Here’s a really neat book for modelers. Illustrated and written by renowned profile artist Chris Sandham-Baily, aka Sandworm, RAF Cold War Jet Aircraft in Profile covers 14 different aircraft types designed and built by British companies and operated by the RAF between 1945 and 2010.

The book features over 300 different colour profiles of the following types: Gloster Meteor, de Havilland Vampire, de Havilland Venom, English Electric Canberra, Supermarine Swift, Hawker Hunter, Vickers Valiant, Gloster Javelin, Handley Page Victor, Avro Vulcan, Blackburn Buccaneer, English Electric Lightning, Hawker Siddeley Harrier and SEPECAT Jaguar. Two types most notable by their absence are the McDonnell Douglas Phantom and the Panavia Tornado, both of whose omission is a major fault in my view.

Sandham-Bailey’s profile work is well-respected and arguably the best in the business, so the quality here is terrific and the presentation is well thought out with the landscape format of the book encouraging reproduction at the largest size possible with never more than two profiles per page. While this book features the core material of a bookazine released a few years ago, the landscape format of the book lends itself better to the material than a magazine’s portrait layout.

Alongside the profiles is a concise text documenting the development and history of the type in RAF service, multi-aspect scale plans, scrap views and detailed notes on all the types. My only other gripe with the book, but this a minor one, is that the plans include a scale bar, but not an actual scale which is left to the reader to work out for themselves.

All in all, this is a wonderful resource for the modeler of RAF jet aircraft and I cannot recommend it highly enough. Many thanks to Casemate for the review sample and their support of IPMS/USA.