Not so many years ago, the air force was the glamour military service - of Israel, the United States, Great Britain, or any major power. The life-or-death aerial dogfights, the pinpoint bombing of vital targets and all the other difficult, challenging missions aloft captivated the imagination of young and old around the world.

But alas, the nature of warfare has changed drastically in the last decade or so, and the exploits of "flyboys" - such as they are - draw little attention these days. Major combat now is much more focused on the ground, in what seems like a semi-permanent guerrilla war.

So it is as a bit of modern history - chronicling a time so recent yet bygone - that this autobiography of one of Israel's outstanding military pilots is most fascinating. From the standpoint of one who was in the heart of the action, General Amir describes how Israel's Air Force rose from a small ill-equipped outfit to become one of the world's two or three best, and tells of his role in making it so.

Amir has written a meticulously detailed account of his key missions - from before he entered the cockpit to after his return to base - starting in the early 1960s and going through the Six-Day War of 1967, the subsequent War of Attrition against Egypt in 1969-70 and the Yom Kippur war of 1973. Interspersed with his stories of combat are chapters dealing with his growing-up years, going back to his childhood in Tel Aviv during and immediately after World War II.

Blessed with what seems like boundless self-confidence and a big ego, Amir displays a can-do attitude throughout these pages - he expresses few if any doubts of his ability. Of course, these are qualities essential for any top-of-the-line military pilot.

Still, he admits that the times were not without their failures. He bemoans the failure to "achieve a clear and unambiguous victory" in the 1969-70 War of Attrition, as they were unable to destroy the large number of surface-to-air missile sites the Egyptians, with Soviet help, had installed west of the Suez Canal. This failure proved costly in the early stages of the Yom Kippur War. And, he is quite critical of the high-level decision at the start of the Yom Kippur War to divert virtually the entire Air Force to the Syrian front. Finally, despite the destruction of Syrian missile sites at the start of the Lebanon War in 1982 he admits the war subsequently became bogged down for various reasons.

And, in his concluding chapter, he does not hide his disappointment at being passed over for the coveted post of Air Force commander in 1982. And that is the year his story concludes, at which point he retired from active duty and pursued a career in civil aviation - he was executive vice president of El Al. Perhaps ending his account at that time is appropriate, for not very long afterwards the role of air forces began to decline, until now there are no more fighter aces, no more stories of gallantry in the skies a la both World Wars and the wars of the '60s and ''70s.

The book is well-written, or at least well translated from the Hebrew. Published in Great Britain, it includes British spellings and expressions. Also, Amir's way of interspersing combat accounts with those of his younger days takes a little getting used to.  Still, as an inside look at a heroic and often glorious era, it certainly deserves to be read.