Stick and Rudder: An Explanation of the Art of Flying,   ISBN:9780070362406

Customer Rating: 

I first read this book when I was learning to fly in the late 60's. When I got my CFI I used it as a teaching tool for all my students and insisted they read it. It is timeless in its explanation of how an airplane flies. Anyone who disses this book is an accident waiting to happen. If you can't recover from a spin don't fly an airplane. I added that last comment to encourage students to make sure your CFI teaches you the procedure. It is simple and may save your life.

Customer Rating: 

Although this book seems to have been intended for the student pilot, my opinion is that it's more valuable to be read leisurely after you've been flying awhile. For a student pilot, I can see where some of what's presented might be confused with the curriculum that today's instructor could be trying to get across. Of course, my review here is biased since I read it after 400 hours but I feel that this book has given me an additional, though slightly different, view of aerodynamics and has definitely helped me become a better pilot!

Customer Rating: 

As a private pilot for over 10 years and owner of my own airplane, I finally decided to read this book. Everyone told me this was THE classic book on flying.

I've got news for you. It isn't. It was 390 pages that desperately needed editing. The information in this book could have easily been contained in 100 pages. If you liked the boring lectures of long winded professors you had in college, then this book is for you. Otherwise, save your money. Yes, many of the concepts he discusses are correct. So what. Tell me something I don't know. Give me some new insight to make me a better pilot. The only information I got out of this book that wasn't really new, but was worth having Wolfgang repeat is that most pilots are killed in low altitude stalls. So if you ever get in one, get the stick forward first!

The book was written in 1944 and I can believe it. Thank God they don't write books today like they used to. If you're interested in learning about flying or how to be a better pilot, I would suggest you can do better by getting a subscription to Plane and Pilot Magazine, Flying Magazine, or joining AOPA and making use of their online resources. This book needs to be retired like the tail dragger it came in on.

Customer Rating: 

The book is great at introducing all the basics of flying an airplane. By flying, I mean controlling it in the air, plus takeoff and landing. This book does not teach you navigation, flight planning, communication with air traffic controllers, etc. It is pure and simple: the basics of controlling an airplane. The illustrations, although basic, are very good at explaining the concepts.

If there is one weakness, it is the author's style of always introducing a topic or technique by talking about the wrong way(s) of doing something before getting to the recommended way. He even has this misleading tone of "you would do X, Y, Z when landing" and then a page later you find out that he was describing the wrong approach. My grandfather often explains things the same way, so I found this endearing :)

This was the first guidebook on aviation I read. I highly recommend it to you too.

Customer Rating: 

I read this book 30 years ago when I was a student pilot. It really opened my eyes to the way an airplane actually flies. The FAA has no requirement for pilots to learn most of this and therefore it isn't covered in most aviation programs. I went on to serve as a flight instructor for 11 years. The lack of understanding on the part of the trainees was always painful to watch. I recommended this book to everyone of them. My purchase was to replace a long lost copy. No serious aviation buff should be without a copy of this old classic in his library.