He edited Jane's All the World's Aircraft (JAWA) for three decades during the Cold War between the Soviet Union and its Warsaw Pact allies and the USA/European alliance (NATO).
He retired as Jane's editor in 1989, just as the Iron Curtain obscuring much of the Soviet Bloc's technology started to be revealed.
Taylor died age 77 and specialised in what has been called "Kremlinology", in that he made predictions of the performance of Soviet military equipment from poor and sometimes blurred photographs and other evidence.
But Taylor, after noting the shape of the aircraft's engine intakes, put the maximum at no more than Mach 1.4, which proved much closer to the truth.
In 1983, he analysed the MiG-29 fighter, whose agility was the cause of much anxiety amongst NATO's war-gamers; seven years later, when Jane's was able to check his suggested measurements, they were found to be accurate to within an inch. "