Recognition: Field Manual, FM 30-30 - Recognition Pictorial Manual (1943) - Table of Contents

War Department Field Manual, FM 30-30, Military Intelligence. Aircraft Recognition Pictorial Manual, Washington, April 1, 1943. This manual supersedes FM 30-30, February 21, 1942; FM 30-31, August 1, 1941; FM 30-34, July 18, 1941, FM 30-35, March 11, 1942; FM 30-38, March 16, 1942; FM 30-39, October 24, 1941. Training Division - Bureau of Aeronautics, Navy Department. FM 30-30 is identical to US NAVY BUAER 3. Avialable as PDF.

As most  30 series recognition manuals, this is a general purpose pamphlet as well. Since this is a mid-war edition, all information and data are rather accurate. However, the manual is not free of errors, as close inspection will reveal.

Military recognition is based on the typical aspects of an object, not on the many small details, which may be present in "spotters guides" or similar. (see FM 21-80). Since this is a manual for all services, technical information on the types is kept to a minimum. The publication of technical information, including detailed performance data, used a different kind of pamphlet in the 40 series. (example: Intelligence Summary 43-33 German Aircraft and Armament., Office Of Chief of Air Staff, Intelligence, Washington (1943)  ).

A chracteristic page of this manual looks like this:

Since most of the information in this manual is based on graphical representations of aircraft, it is published as a downloadable PDF file.

( A small comment on PDFs: The Manual is presented as is. Any errors are by the original print. The quality of text and pictures are below the general standard of this web site by purpose and design. The reason is simple. This site offers numerous documents free of charge. Some of the original documents are cheap - some incure several hundred $$. Of course there are other sites. And some sites will ask you, as the reader, for money to obtain a CD or the likes for the sort of information offered here. To discourage copying of site content from airfronts, reproduction quality in PDFs is kept low. Each page has a "watermark" as unobtrusive as possible. These marks are put in place to discourage any "leeching" of your wallet. Apologies for any distractions caused by this. If you, as a  reader need higher quality reproductions, feel free to e-mail the web-master)

DOWNLOAD PDF HERE (This file is about 17 MB in size)

This manual includes aircraft from the following air services:

US Army

US Navy

Great Britain

Germany

Japan

Italy

This manual is a "loose leaf" binder with the pages held in place by khaki shoe strings. Literally. Other specimens may differ. Subdivisions for the USSR and "Miscelaneous" are empty. FM 30-30 in the form presented has seen updates well into the fifties, before a name change took place. Those updates will be made available later on this site.