Antonov's Turboprop Twins: An-24/An-26/An-30/An-32 (Red Star)

The book covers the Antonov light twin engined turboprop transports, namely the An-24, -26, -30 and -32 families with all their variants. As is common for the authors and the Red Star series, you get lots of information in a compact volume, combined with a raft of pictures, drawings and other material.The book starts with an introduction on the needs of air transport in the Soviet Union in the 1950s and with how the An-26 (first use of the designation, not the later, much better known model) was partially designed to deal with those. It then jumps straight into the development of the An-24 proper and the subtypes in operation. This is standard Gordon / Komissarov fare, where you will get to know every sub-model, including the serial numbers (where known), air crashes, flight test details, etc.Following this comes the section on the main development version, namely the An-26 - likewise with all the sub-varieties covered. The CHinese copies are covered for both the An-24 and An-26, these sections are much briefer than in the volume on the An-12 ( Antonov An-12 the Soviet Hercules (Red Star) ), however, as the types have been much less prolific in Chinese service. After the two main (from a numbers point of view) types the authors go through the 'in detail' section, describing all the design and construction details of these two versions of the family.In the following sections the last two types - the aerial mapping / reconnaissance An-30 and the hot and high An-32 - are described, with details on the versions, development histories and operators but without a separate 'in detail' section.The authors also cover civilian as well as military use and go through some operators but these sections work much less well than the format chose in  Antonov An-12 the Soviet Hercules (Red Star) .In spite of lots of useful information on these so important types, the book disappoints somewhat when compared to the author's other works. As opposed to pretty much all the others in the series that I have read, which always provide more than expected, this one does not. The initial An.26 progenitor is not shown with a single drawing or with any details, the section on foreign operators is much less well thought out than in some other volumes in the series, there are only detail descriptions of the former two types and 3D drawings of the latter two, etc. Some of this is probably down to the limited page number of the format but then surely the better solution would have been to produce two volumes.Be that as it may, I would still give the book a (weak) four stars, as it is packed with lots of interesting information about some quite significant post-war aviation workhorses - even if it is not the best the authors are known to be capable of.

This is the first Midland ``Red Star'' volume to arrive on my shelves. I had previously bought Gordon's Il-18 Aerofax and was interested to see how the Antonov book compared.Per Gordon's usual approach, each model and variant is discussed in chronological order with many interesting details of design decisions and construction techniques; I had not previously known that the An-24 incorporated bonding instead of riveting for a majority of components. Scattered throughout the text are operational parameters such as SFC and field performance but I was disappointed with the disorganised presentation of this data and the lack of payload / range graphs. Five decades later and we still can't compare the An-24 to the F.27!The chapter on local airline service reveals several snags and shortcomings discovered during service though we have no information on the handling of the aircraft other than the VVS felt that it was suitable for ``average pilots''Graphically the book is illustrated with many previously-unseen images, mostly of good quality. The ine drawings of the An-30 are excellent, but are accompanied only by rather poor drawings of the An-32 prototype. There are no such drawings of the 24 or 26 which, with the disproportionate attention given in the text to the An-30, reinforces the feeling that the authors weren't particularly interested in the base variants.The prose occasionally reads as if it has been condensed to fit within a defined page count. The book would have benefitted from being expanded to 196 pages or else the An-30 and -32 could have been awarded a separate volume to permit expanded discussion of the base models. The Chinese variants are not treated with any depth of detail, perhaps again because of the page quota.At times the text lapses into conversational language, a common problem with Yefim Gordon's works, but overall the book is informative and revealing. I have only awarded three stars because I was left feeling slightly disappointed; with some more effort and more pages this book would have compared more favourably with that of the Il-18 which I feel is the superior volume.