"Ask the Pilot"

[fiefoe]

The blue-and-white tech manual like cover does the book a disservice. Sometimes plain is austere, other times, it's plain plain. And the pilot in question, Patrick Smith, is clearly a man of aesthetics. Any man who can speak of 'dot matrix splendor' is.

I don't know how much knowledge I would retain after reading this, (ask me three months later if I can explain why the NYC-Johannesburg flight only goes nonstop in one direction, and tell me the hint is 'altitude',) but maybe that isn't quite the point. After describing a confusion of rudders, elevators, spoilers and ailerons, (they fine tune the motions of pitch, roll, and yaw), the author duly warns the hapless reader: 'If you're still with me, and before committing this all to memory , you'll be thrilled to know there are idiosyncratic variants of almost everything just described.'

Here is the heart of the matter, according to our pilot:

• The indignities of flying aside, there are..., still many jewels, both aesthetic and existential, to be found.
• In the case of commercial aviation, luxury and privilege were distilled into vinegar for the masses. But don't we lose valuable perspective on our own capabilities and triumphs when we begin to equate the commonplace, more or less by definition, with the tedious? Don't we forfeit a bit of our pride when we sneer indifferently at the sight of a jet airplane-something that is, at heart, a world-changing triumph of industrial design?
  

By the way, this book also began its life online. Also, in Flying 101, we run into Daniel Bernoulli again.