Seemingly just in time for people who are building Trumpeter’s new F-100D kit comes Thomas Gardner’s F-100 Super Sabre At War book.  This book reminds me of the Warbird Tech series, relying heavily on pages from various F-100 manuals to illustrate flight limits, airframe parts, fuel system, and other components.  The book is full of black & white and color photos, showing all of the different versions of the F-100.  While the pages from the flight and maintenance manuals can be great aids to help describe different aircraft systems, like the Warbird Tech books, many seem to be thrown in as “filler,” or are reproduced in too small a format to be very useful.

 Gardner goes into great detail describing many of the technical aspects of the aircraft and how it compared to a couple of its contemporaries, the F4D Skyray and the MiG-19.  There is a full chapter on weapons systems, some good history on the J-57 engine, and a very detailed explanation of the F-100’s tendency towards roll-coupling and how it killed test pilot George Welsh.  Even though the title suggests the book is about the F-100 “At War,” there is actually very little said about the type’s war record.  The Wild Weasels get a small chapter, but no photos of the Weasel jets, and the Misty FACs are mentioned in a small section at the end of that chapter.  There is nothing on the close air support mission the F-100 spent the vast majority of her time in Vietnam doing, other than in a few photo captions.  While the Air National guard jets are represented in photos, there is no mention of the F-100’s long service with Guard units in the text. 

A chapter is devoted to foreign users of the F-100, and another on the development of the F-107, with details on the aircraft systems, ejection seat, and engine.  At the end of the chapter is a short section on the Zero-Length launch system, where a large rocket engine was strapped to the lower aft fuselage and then the jet and it’s hapless pilot was launched off the back of a trailer or out of a bunker. The RF-100A also gets a couple of paragraphs in this chapter. 

 Several appendices are provided, showing production numbers, significant dates, and specifications pages from the F-100 Dash-1 flight manual.  A “Modeler’s Section” is provided as an appendix, but this only has some station diagrams and a multi-view drawing of the F-100D; nothing that would be of any use to somebody wanting to correct or add detail to a particular Super Sabre kit.   

There is a single photo of the Skyblazers and one mention of a Thunderbirds accident, but no mention of the teams’ use of the F-100.  The book has a lot of great photos, but the person who edited the photos was very sloppy, cropping the photos instead of resizing them to fit the book.  There are several photos badly cropped to cut noses and/or tails off.  The worst has a caption that reads, “The F-102A afterburner nozzle eyelids show up well in this view…” but the photo stops just forward of the nozzle!  I believe Mr. Gardner needs to fire his photo editor.

 While the subject matter isn’t really what the title suggests, this is a good book if you want to dig into some of the more technical details of the F-100.  There are some great photos, but it would have been nice to have these in larger format and in place of some of the reproductions of the manual pages.  If you want a thorough operational history of the jet, try David Anderton’s “North American F-100 Super Sabre” or Peter Davies’ and Dave Menard’s book by the same title.  The contents of each of these books make a fine compliment to the other.  The Detail & Scale book is still the best modelers’ reference.  This book is recommended for F-100 geeks like me, who like to know how stuff works.

 Book courtesy of my wallet.

 Ben Brown

June  2007

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