There is a comparative dearth of textbooks available to assist the aviation lawyer. Any new books on the subject are therefore generally to be welcomed. This new book edited by Richard Hames and Graham McBain, both experienced practitioners in aircraft financing, is of particular interest because of the new ground it covers in this important area of aviation law practice.

Aviation finance is an international subject and the practitioner is constantly dealing with the law and practice of foreign jurisdictions. The issues which arise in each place tend to be of a recurring nature. Hames and McBain have used the convenient approach of listing the questions which are typically asked of foreign lawyers; the main body of the book comprises the answers to those questions on a country-by-country basis, provided by local lawyers. This treatment of a subject is not entirely innovative—it was adopted in Kluwer’s recently published Maritime Law Handbook but has not previously been used in this sphere of aviation finance law.

A significant achievement of the book is that it has collected and presented in a common format information about the law and practice in foreign jurisdictions previously available, if at all, only in different works in a number of languages across the world.

The book is in loose-leaf format, and will be periodically supplemented and updated. The entries for a number of the countries intended eventually to be covered have been omitted from the initial text and these can be inserted as and when they become available. Among those as yet unavailable are the entries for a number of key jurisdictions, whereas the book does already include entries for one or two countries which might have been regarded as the less significance to most aviation lawyers. For example, at the time of writing there are no entries for Italy or Finland, whereas Jamaica and Panama have been covered. The present lack of coverage of countries such as Liberia and Uruguay is however unlikely to inconvenience greatly the average practitioner. The editors have indicated that a second volume later this year will include Italy and Finland, together with such other important commercial jurisdictions as India, which is presently not mentioned.

The introductory section contains a brief summary of the Conventions which establish the basic international regulatory framework relevant to the airfinance lawyer. The full texts of the Chicago Convention (the registration of aircraft), Geneva Convention (registration of security interests) and 1933 Rome Convention (the arrest of aircraft) are each set out in an Appendix. Most lawyers practising in this field will in any event already have the texts of these Conventions in other books in their libraries and, indeed, will almost certainly also have a more detailed analysis of their terms. Nevertheless, the questions and answers included have been carefully selected and it seems sensible to include the Conventions in a book which refers to them constantly.

The introduction also contains an extremely useful section on aviation insurance written by Peter Viccars of Bowring Aviation Ltd., well known for his knowledge and expertise in this field. Again the question and answer technique is used and this section will not only be