Cockpit Confidential: Everything You Need to Know About Air Travel: Questions, Answers, and Reflections Author: Patrick Smith | Language: English | ISBN:
B00C69H7RC | Format: EPUB
Cockpit Confidential: Everything You Need to Know About Air Travel: Questions, Answers, and Reflections Description
For millions of people, travel by air is a confounding, uncomfortable, and even fearful experience. Patrick Smith, airline pilot and author of the web's popular Ask the Pilot feature, separates the fact from fallacy and tells you everything you need to know...
•How planes fly, and a revealing look at the men and women who fly them
•Straight talk on turbulence, pilot training, and safety
•The real story on congestion, delays, and the dysfunction of the modern airport
•The myths and misconceptions of cabin air and cockpit automation
•Terrorism in perspective, and a provocative look at security
•Airfares, seating woes, and the pitfalls of airline customer service
•The colors and cultures of the airlines we love to hate
Cockpit Confidential covers not only the nuts and bolts of flying, but also the grand theater of air travel, from airport architecture to inflight service to the excitement of travel abroad. It's a thoughtful, funny, at times deeply personal look into the strange and misunderstood world of commercial flying.
The ideal book for frequent flyers, nervous passengers, and global travelers.
Refreshed and vastly expanding from the original Ask the Pilot, with approximately 75 percent new material.
- File Size: 976 KB
- Print Length: 320 pages
- Publisher: Sourcebooks (May 7, 2013)
- Sold by: Amazon Digital Services, Inc.
- Language: English
- ASIN: B00C69H7RC
- Text-to-Speech: Enabled
X-Ray:
- Lending: Not Enabled
- Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #1,674 Paid in Kindle Store (See Top 100 Paid in Kindle Store)
- #1
in Books > Travel > Food, Lodging & Transportation > Air Travel - #1
in Books > Travel > Reference > General - #1
in Kindle Store > Kindle eBooks > Nonfiction > Professional & Technical > Transportation > Aviation > Commercial
- #1
in Books > Travel > Food, Lodging & Transportation > Air Travel - #1
in Books > Travel > Reference > General - #1
in Kindle Store > Kindle eBooks > Nonfiction > Professional & Technical > Transportation > Aviation > Commercial
Expecting an update of Patrick Smith's earlier book, Ask the Pilot: Everything You Need to Know About Air Travel, I was surprised to see a completely different book. Yes, he still answers questions that passengers are curious about, such as how dangerous is turbulence, and what is in the air supply in the cabin, but he goes into many other topics that are of interest to people who enjoy flying. He discusses airline logos and liveries (the paint jobs on the planes) and airline names.
Smith is often pedantic and always opinionated, and it all makes for an entertaining book. He has some definite thoughts about the service on airlines, which is a little surprising, since he is a pilot for a major U.S. airline (but he doesn't say which one), and he also has some comments about passengers, which are usually less strident, such as his puzzlement over why sudoku is so popular. Just don't get him started on airport security.
One important reason Smith's book may appeal to more people than a straightforward question and answer book would, is that Smith is not only an industry professional, but he's often a passenger, traveling for fun, so he knows what it's like to sit in coach. This dual point of view, which is apparently not very common among airline employees, many of whom don't care to travel on their own time or dime, gives Smith more perspective, so he's not just the lecturer here, he knows your travelin' pain.
Not only does he travel, he enjoys airports, flying, and seeing new places. He intersperses his question and answer sections with musings on travel.
Are you a nervous flyer? Are you someone who'd rather drive than fly? Are you someone who doesn't get excited looking at the lights of planes as they line up in the night sky outside a busy airport, coming in for a landing, one after the other? On the other hand, do you know what the terms "OAG", "triple 7", and "Runway Two-niner" refer to? If you're the latter and not the former, you'll enjoy Patrick Smith's new book, "Cockpit Confidential".
Patrick Smith - the name "Smith" is a nom-de-plume - is an airline pilot and blogger, who operates out of Boston. He used to blog for SALON magazine but I'm not sure he still writes for them. In any case, he has his own website, askthepilot.com, and this new book. His previous one, "Ask the Pilot: Everything You Need to Know About Flying", was published in 2004. Smith has been been a pilot and in love with all forms of air travel since, as a child living in Boston, he'd sit on the Revere beach and watch in awe as planes landed at nearby Logan Airport. He grew up to make a living as first a pilot for a commuter carrier - flying up and down the Atlantic seaboard and all around New England - and then he "graduated" to flying cargo jets for a freight airline. Finally, he's now flying for an international passenger airline. (I think it might be Delta, from what I've been able to glean from his writing. Or, if not, American.) He has been subjected to layoffs during his career and is quite honest about how he - and other pilots - struggle with the on-going airline politics and economic ups-and-down that make a pilot's career somewhat haphazard.
Okay, Patrick Smith and I are airline fanatics. And, probably so are most people reading this review. Most of us fly a lot - Smith is lucky that he gets paid to do so - and we like to see new places.
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