Dan Hampton is a F-16 pilot and author, who offers an entertaining, if flawed look at the elite brotherhood of fighter pilots, starting from the First World War and moving through the 2003 Invasion of Iraq. The style intersperses novelist accounts of combat with historical sketches, and analysis of changes in aircraft and tactics.

The book starts well enough, with Roland Garros using an machine gun shooting through the armored propeller of his Morane-Saulnier scout to destroy a German scout plane. Soon, famous aces like Boelcke and Lanoe Hawker were dueling over the trenches, and planes began getting faster and more heavily armed. The first section, on the Great War and aerial mercenaries in the interwar era, is a delight, joyfully written and comprehensive. The basic qualities of the lords of the sky are laid out. Excellent flying skills, good gunnery, confidence and aggressiveness, and some qualities of leadership to train and command aerial armies.

But as Hampton gets closer to the present day, the quality declines. WW2 is the Battle of Britain, Midway, and the tales of Nazi super-ace Hans-Joachim Marseille and female Soviet ace Lilya Litvyak. Post-WW2, we have Korea, Vietnam, the Yom Kippur War, and then Desert Storm and Iraq II. Hampton gets lost in jargon, and doesn't clearly get across what air combat with guided missiles, electronic warfare, and a hostile integrated air defense environment is like.

And then there are the errors. The B-29 is not a "large jet", an elementary mistake. In the description of the forces on an airplane in flight, lift counteracts drag, and thrust counteract weight, which a basic force diagram shows is nonsense. While it's impossible to give a complete history of air combat in a single volume, at 623 pages, this book feels both too long, and also incomplete.