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Okay, I know I said the whole book review thing was a dead loss for me, but here is another.

The best book I have read since learning to fly is volume one in Barry Schiff’s proficient pilot series. This is a link to the whole boxed set, a set I now think is invaluable. The book reads like a series of columns from a magazine that have been expanded a bit. I suspect that Schiff has a regular gig and has figured out a way to repackage writing he has already done… but what great stuff it is. Click to continue »

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What am I doing blogging? I should be writing a grant. I should be flying. Anything but blogging. Worse, I am writing a book review. I never saw the point of Colin’s, but here I am with one myself. I have not flown in two weeks. I have been reading though. Barry Schiff’s books on piloting are awesome, but today I want to tell you about the odd little book I found on Amazon. ’101 things to do with your private pilot’s license’ seemed like it might have some good tips on maintaining the steep learning curve post-dual instruction. Instead it is a little guide to what your instructor would have told you if they were interested in answerering your questions rather than getting you through the practical test.

For example… Bob (our main Private Pilot instructor) gave us an example of four people wanting to go to Palm Springs. They were one hundred pounds over weight with full tanks. “Siphon some gas,” was his advice, or perhaps leave a set of clubs behind. Never take off over max gross though. I asked how they figured max gross. Is there a fudge factor? Would he take off 1 pound over? Would he refuse to fly if within ten pounds of max? No answer, just “Siphon some gas.” This is horse crap. Planes clearly take off above max gross all the time. How much is safe, that’s what I wanted to know. How unsafe is ten pounds versus a hundred. Can you get off the ground a thousand pounds over? Click to continue »

I should have kept a blog as I was reading these books, but I didn’t know how long my interest in aviation was going to last and certainly didn’t know that I might want to share my musings about it with an audience larger than Adam.Free Flight is the story of two airplanes and the system that NASA and the FAA envisions allowing the population at large to fly them. James Fallows is an easy, clear writer and none of the book is difficult to get through. Although there’s some technical information presented he somehow keeps it light.

The best two chapters, both of which I asked Nell to read before we took our first flight together, were the first and last. Fallows flew across the country with his college-aged son and his wife. They went from the bay area to the Boston area to drop his son at college. His descriptions of the flight are entrancing. Somehow, during a rather pedestrian activity, he ties all of the wonder of flight, all of the magic of knowing how to fly, into the string of anecdotes which connect the Palo Alto airport and one near Boston’s Back Bay. Click to continue »

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by Rinker Buck

I am not sure yet how these book reviews will work. I feel a little silly writing things here that I know are easily found with a few clicks on Amazon.Com. Nonetheless: Rinker Buck is fifteen years old and his brother Kern is seventeen years old. It is 1966 and they fly across the country in a Piper Cub. That’s an old tail dragger airplane, without a radio or GPS or lights of any sort.

Some of his writing about flying is perfect and exactly what I would have said. He is not the pilot his brother is, and as long as Adam retains his fifty-landing lead in our logbooks, I will feel the same way. (Adam has also done spins and spin recovery, landed on unpaved air strips and other more advanced flying.) The book is a memoir about brotherhood, but also about adventure. The technical details of flying aren’t picked apart too much, and there is quite a bit about Rinker’s relationship with his father. The more aviation books I read, the more I try to figure out what I might want to write. I am sure a lot of my writing will be here in the blog first, and some of it will be aloud, with Adam in the cockpit listening to my rants. (I always figure if you edit a rant down, slip some narrative in there and punch it up with a little character humor… why there’s a book right there waiting to be published.)

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by Clyde Edgerton

I am always a little curious about this sort of book. Mr. Edgerton has published a bunch books and eight of them were New York Times best sellers. So does his editor say, “Write anything you want, Clyde,” or does Clyde fight to publish this non-fiction account of his flying and military experience? There’s even a little bit near the end about his struggle to write Floatplane Notebooks, which I will probably snag and take a look at, but in general this feels a lot like Kurt Vonnegut’s Timequake.

There’s very little real writing; mostly it feels like musing. That’s fine at times, but there doesn’t feel like there’s much effort to carry a through-line or to really write each story as powerfully as possible. There are some nice descriptions of flying both near the beginning and near the end (when he gets back into a little plane). He seems to have trouble with the war effort he is a part of (Vietnam), but he stayed in until the end of his bit and he didn’t turn around and start protesting.

I would have liked some more about flying.