Boyd: The Fighter Pilot Who Changed the Art of War
By (Author) Robert Coram
Little, Brown & Company
Little, Brown & Company
3rd April 2003
United States
General
Non Fiction
Biography: philosophy and social sciences
Aircraft and aviation
358.4383092
496
300g
A larger-than-life fighter pilot & a genius of aviation, engineering & military strategy. He dared to challenge the intractable military bureacracy & its outmoded practices. The determination developed in his youth carried him on to renown for his skill as a fighter pilot & for his passion as an instructor, his legendary appetite & lack of respect for his superiors. But this was just the start as he went on to transform the way military planes were designed, fighting the air force's entrenched ideas every step of the way & his breakthrough designs were crucial to the creation of the F-15 & 16. He dedicated years to an innovative theory of conflict that eventually made him the most influential military theoretician since Sun Tzu. A magnet for bright young men, dissatisfied with the impractically old-fashioned methods of the military & his circle of 'acolytes' extended his influence through their headline-grabbing Reform Movement. By the time of Boyd's death his name had reached the furthest corners of the military establishment. Now Coram paints a colourful portrait of the man who locked horns with the most conventional of bureacracies - and won.
Corram has written 3 books of non-fiction as well as 7 novels. His articles have appeared in the New Yorker & other major mags & he has been nominated twice for a Pulitzer He is a qualified commercial pilot and is one of the few civilians to have flown both the F-100 and the F-15.