Stick and Rudder: An Explanation of the Art of Flying

List Price: $26.95 Discount Price: $15.45

Customer Reviews:

Beyond Informative! [Posted on 2008-04-09]
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 [Posted on 2008-05-15]
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Yes, the physics and writing style are outdated (read Smith's "Illustrated Guide to Aerodynamics" for a more complete yet still readable explanation of the physics of lift, and why Bernoulli's 'suction' and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.

Fantastic! [Posted on 2008-07-02]
This book is simply fantastic. Yes, there are some old or simplified opinions, but as for tool for explaining how the airplane flies, invaluable.

excellent [Posted on 2008-09-27]
i haven't started flying lessons yet, but this book is excellent and I'm sure it will help a lot when I do start flying. It explains everything very well and clearly.

Understanding flying [Posted on 2008-11-24]
Having just started the pilot course, I got the advice to buy this book. Though I was surprised that it'd been authored a long time ago, it's written in a very comprehensible and enjoyable way. I didn't read it yet just skimmed through it but I look forward the free time to do that. I would recommend it to anybody who is excited about piloting.

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