Non-Fiction Pick of the Week: Ask the Pilot

Ask the Pilot: Everything you need to know about air travel by Patrick Smith 2004

For people who fly a great deal or those who fear flying, this book is a real Q & A of air travel, and that is how the book is organized: questions and answers.

Smith begins with a chapter “for neophytes” and for this and the next two chapters, he offers the reader good information about landings and take-offs, aging planes, the difference between turbofans and turbines and a host of other primer aviation data. The next two chapters are about the pilots and crew of the skies: are they qualified, are they sleeping, are they irrelevant and why briefing babble is important. In the last two chapters, Smith throws in a hodge-podge of unusual, but perhaps often thought of or asked facts about air crashes, flotation devices, red-eye flights, big airplanes, and other fatuous flights of fancy.

Ask the Pilot is an interesting book for people who fly on occasion or regularly. It contains frank answers to some common questions, fears or assumptions. I particularly found topics of turbulence and windshear relevant with the recent number of airline mishaps. Perhaps when a number of tragic events in aviation happen, we feel better somehow knowing why it happened so that we understand these events, thus allowing us to feel more confident the next time we decide to slip the surly bonds of earth and fly away.