Beyond Informative! | Stick and Rudder: An Explanation of the Art of Flying

My first and still favorite text on piloting a plane | Stick and Rudder: An Explanation of the Art of Flying | Wolfgang Langewiesche

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	• Stick and Rudder: An Explanation of the Art of Flying Wolfgang Langewiesche McGraw-Hill Professional, 1990 - 390 pages average customer review:based on 64 reviews view larger image
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highly recommended

Fantastic!

This book is simply fantastic. Yes, there are some old or simplified opinions, but as for tool for explaining how the airplane flies, invaluable.

Beyond Informative!

To begin, the entire Amazon experience was great. The product itself was the icing on the cake. Any aspiring pilots, or veterans, should consider this a "must read" publication. It clarifies many misled bits of advice, about flight, and makes knowledge of aircraft easily understood.

My first and still favorite text on piloting a plane

I remember reading and re-reading this text as a young boy--fascinated by everything and anything related to airplanes--flying imaginary airplanes in my head with the admonition to always 'watch my angle of attack'. When I finally got my pilot's license years later, I credit this book with doing the most to make me a safe and confident pilot (second only to my great instructor.) It dispels the popular belief in the general public that the rudder turns the plane and the throttle makes it go faster, and explains to pilots the reality of flight: the elevator controls angle of attack and hence airspeed, the ailerons control the turn, and the rudder is primarily a means of correcting for physical phenomenon such as adverse yaw. Even today the largest killer of pilots is the stall/spin, the result of hoping that pulling back on the stick will make the ground go away, or that more inside rudder will fix that overshoot on final. Yes, Mr. Langewiesche repeats the point again and again, but it's worth repeating: the stick controls the angle of attack, and if you don't exceed the critical angle of attack, the plane won't stall. If the plane doesn't stall, it doesn't spin either. It's that simple, and that profound.

Yes, the physics and writing style are outdated (read Smith's "Illustrated Guide to Aerodynamics" for a more complete yet still readable explanation of the physics of lift, and why Bernoulli's 'suction' and Langewiesche's 'downwash' are just two different ways of looking at the same phenomenon.) And if you're flying a modern unstable fighter or fly-by-wire jumbo jet Langewiesche's simple concepts break down. For today's modern GA aircraft, however, this is still the most readable text there is for explaining not how an airplane flies, but how to fly them.

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Stick and Rudder

This is a wonderful book, it's written for the Student pilot. But, it's a great read for all pilots. It covers the big picture and the little things that you may not think of, or may have forgotten. This book may help the new CFI to teach different techniques to the student pilot.

In the early 1940's, Wolfgang Langewiesche wrote a series of articles in Air Facts analyzing the various aspects of piloting techniques. Based on these articles, Langewiesche's classic work on the art of flying was published in 1944. This book explains precisely what pilots do when they fly, just how they do it, and why. These basics are largely unchanging. The book applies to large airplanes and small, old airplanes and new, and is of interest not only to the learner but also to the accomplished pilot and instructor. Today, several excellent manuals offer the pilot accurate and valuable technical information. But Stick and Rudder remains the leading think-book on the art of flying.

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