Hello all,
Goshawk Sqdn is a poor book because Robinson has no knowledge of the time in which it was set, the mores and language of the people concerned. In historical novels, apart from a knowledge of the time, and any technical details (aeroplanes etc, and putting bullets through somebody's tailplane to encourage them to get nearer to the target, really!!) it's important to get the mode and patterns of speech correct for the period, otherwise a false impression of the period is given to the reader and everything goes out of the window. This is what made the Aubrey/Maturin novels of Patrick O'Brian so much better than the other novels in the genre. People speak in the speech patterns of the time and all the details of daily life in the period are accurate, giving a true picture of the time in which story takes place. This takes the reader into the time. Read
Winged Victory by V Yeates and see how bad Goshawk Sqdn really is. This is not to say that Robinson writes badly, I read another of his about WW2 flying (in the desert, if memory serves) which was pretty good. He was obviously on firmer ground with WW2 material. Maybe he knew some WW2 pilots. If you chaps really want to have a really good read of WW1 flying, with some genuine very comic writing thrown in, I'd recommend Three Cheers For Me, That's Me in the Middle, It's Me Again, and the others by Donald Jack. They were published in the middle 70s by Quartet Books.
Sorry to be such a nit picker, but I think it's important to get things right in historical novels. If one picked up a novel about everyday farm folk in Georgian England and one of the characters drove a Fordson tractor, then, hopefully, the book would go out of the window into the trash can.
Cheers
Alex R