largely within the confines of specialist conferences or books each dedicated to perhaps a single element of the overall process. In this book contributors, experts drawn from both academia and the aerospace industry, have joined together to combine their individual knowledge to examine high performance aerospace materials in terms of their production, structure, properties and applications. The central interrelationships between the development of structure through the production route and between structure and the properties exhibited in the final component are considered. It is hoped that the book will be of interest to students of aeronautical engineering and of materials science, together with those working within the aerospace industry. Harvey M. Flower Imperial College 1 Design requirements for aerospace structural materials C. J. Peel and P. J. Gregson 1.