Alpha Jet, Great Picture of the Jet Trainer, Alpha Jet in a Knife Edge Maneuver. 

Belgium can not be called an aviation minded country:  Old airfields are being closed or submitted to stronger restrictions,  noise nuisance has become a key word and flight safety at Airshows is much more important than any other aspect of aviation.

We may be happy that an aviation enthusiast as Marc Arys does exist, who spared no pains as to make a positive minded approach to aviation in general and to the Belgian Air Force in particular.  In his book you now have in front of you , you can see he did not spare any effort nor cost to make it easy readable and attractive.

This study of the Alpha Jet arrives at the time the F-16 demands the major part of attention.  After the Kosovo-crisis the fighter from General Dynamics will probably own his place in aviation history.  It is hereby very important to point out that our complete generation of F-16 flyers received their instruction in the Alpha Jet and that all those young pilots did not encounter any problem to switchover from one plane to the other.

I still have left the best memories of the Alpha Jet:  it was a smooth and easy aeroplane, not a real war machine, but a tool in which you could bring instruction to a very high standard, because afterwards, as I said, it was on the F-16.  Having given for about 600 hours of instruction in it, I can really call it "a pilot's plane".

The reader will find in this book information about every aspect of the Alpha Jet: history and development, use, instruction, maintenance, a bunch of photographs and drawings for the model builders and a lot of technical data.  A series of illustrations make it a real complete book by which I wish you already hours of enjoyable reading.