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ILJUSZYN IL-28 BEAGLE

By Jim Schubert

Pzemyslaw Skulski
Ace Publications, ©2001, 
ISBN 83-86153-63-6

This is Number 13 in Ace's Seria Pod Lupa series of airplane monographs.  It contains 36 numbered pages all printed on good heavy glossy stock, staple bound between heavy gloss stock, color-printed covers.  It has 29 full color photos, 12 color renderings, 80 black & white photos, 23 line drawings, 6 line drawn profiles and 12 line-drawn general arrangement views.  There's a lot of good stuff here!  As our editor received this copy directly from Ace for review, we have no idea of its price or availability in North America.  I do notice that Squadron Mail Order lists no Aces publications in either their annual catalog or in their last two monthly supplements.  This implies the book may be hard to find over here.

We monolinguists will find the worst feature of this book is that the text is all in Polish with English sub-titles only for the captions to the many illustrations.  But this does not really diminish the value of the book to us, as all the illustrations, both photos and drawings, are clear and large enough to be easily "read".

To help myself evaluate this book I dug into my own reference files and found that his book, in spite of the Polish text, pretty well summarizes everything else, to which I have access.  This fact makes it a good, comprehensive, single source reference for model builders.  If I wanted to build a model of a Beagle, this would be the only reference book I'd need.  As, however, this book may be hard to find, I have listed below the other references with which I am familiar.  The Bilek/Italeri 1/72nd kit is certainly the best current offering in this scale and is commonly available for under $20.00 retail.  Forget the old, 1960s vintage, Airfix kit.  To get a good model from that kit you have to scratchbuild one out of the box.

REFERENCES:

Now it may seem strange to have REFERENCES in a book review, but most North American readers will probably have an easier time finding some of these than they will finding the subject book.

1. Flying Review International; Vol.19, No. 10 and January 1969

2. Air Enthusiast; November 1971

3. The World's Fighting Planes, William Green, Doubleday

4. The Observer's World Aircraft Directory; William Green, Warne

5. Sovetska Letadla; Vaclav Nemecek, Nase Vojsko, Prague

6. IPMS-UK Magazine; February 1971

7. Aircam Aviation Series - Finnish Air Force; Osprey

8. Airfix Magazine; November 1972

9. The Israeli Air Force; Moshe Hadar & Yehuda Ofer, Israeli MOD Publishing

10. IPMS-Seattle Quarterly, Russian Jets Special; April 1973*

11. REPLIC No. 65, January 1997; Build review of the Bilek/Italeri kit and Photoscope on the IL-28

*This special issue covered the MiG-15, -17, -19 and -21 and the IL-28.  The NOS inventory is all gone as of early June 2001, but I will copy the 12 page IL-28 section, which sets out 18 color/markings schemes & references vs the seven of the Ace volume, or the entire 44 page issue, for anyone for copy and mailing costs.