1 Pound Egyptian Air Force

Issued to commemorate the Egyptian Air Force, this piece was struck shortly after Egypt's military relationships had been dramatically realigned — the 1979 peace treaty with Israel ended Soviet arms supply agreements and forced Egypt into an almost total reorientation toward American and Western equipment and training. The Air Force being honored here was, by 1983, a fundamentally different institution than the one that crossed the Suez Canal a decade earlier.

The .875 fineness places it in the older 21-karat gold standard traditional to Egyptian jewelry and coinage, rather than the .900 used by most Western commemorative issues of the same period.