SUBMARINES WITH WINGS

Back jacket blurb

The dream of combining aircraft and submarines occurred surprisingly early in the development of both. Following British and German experiments in 1914-1918, many navies built special submersible aircraft carriers between the wars, but only the Japanese persevered with the apparently insurmountable problems, culminating in a planned 1945 raid on the Panama Canal.

In this essentially pictorial book, all these pioneering efforts are well documented, with many extremely rare photographs of the boats and their purpose-built aircraft. However, much of the story relates to the post-1945 period, when the USA carried out many fascinating but little known developments in submarine aviation, including plans for a submarine-launched jet fighter.

Recently, there has been a revival of interest in this concept, and the book concludes with a look at the possible employment of vertical take-off aircraft aboard submarines, and in particular the application of the revolutionary Skyhook launching / recovery systern.

The author

Terry Treadwell is the European Correspondent of the US Navy's aviation magazine Naval Aviation News. He regularly contributes articles to many of the military magazines in the United States, but this is his first book.

Born in Bournemouth, England, he lived for a short time in Australia and has travelled the world extensively, but now lives back in his home town with his wife and son.

Front cover illustration,

by A D Theobald, shows the British submarine M 2 launching her Parnall Peto aircraft.