An extremely disappointing read...
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This should be a terrific book - providing a single source of reference for the would-be airline employee. Sadly, it simply doesn't deliver.
Peppered with technical inaccuracies (some of them horribly glaring), very imprecise or even misleading explanations, and shockingly inaccurate diagrams, it should leave the able student simply disappointed. Sadly, I suspect that many readers will be aspiring pilots cramming for interviews, and they will emerge from their reading confused and with false information.
Some of this is down to simply inept writing - the author uses vague words in a world of precision, confuses terms, and lacks the essential ability to get difficult concepts across in a straightforward manner. Poor or absent research, and the author's assumption that he knows what he is talking about, is to blame elsewhere. Custom and practice within the aviation industry of dumbing down some concepts to make them manageable, blithely accepted by the author either because he doesn't want to buck the trend or can't get to grips, himself, with the truth causes more disappointment for the expert reader.
Finally, there has clearly been no effective effort to proof-read. From basic errors of grammar, punctuation, and spelling, to the publication of straightforwardly inaccurate explanations, indicates that this book has neither been written nor edited properly.
As an aviation professional, now somewhat involved in writing technical material, I was very disappointed indeed by this book.
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Concise and informative
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A great source of reference knowledge for interviews - provides all the "trivial persuits" answers to those little horrors that might get thrown at you. It's a sizeable chunk of book but concise, though details where it needs to be.
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Nice idea, good presentation, shame about the content!
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There is great potential in a book like this... we have all got to the stage where our technical knowledge is a bit fuzzy, and there's an interview coming up. Even those who kept their ATPL theory notes will be loathe to reach for them, so this handy-sized memory-jog should be just the thing to refresh the memory. And, actually, it HAS refreshed my memory. I've found it pretty useful. The questions are well laid out, in a sensible order, and with some pleasant-looking diagrams. So I'm happy with the questions. Some of the answers, on the other hand, are a bit sketchy. Now, I don't know the author, but the back cover implies that he is an 'experienced airline pilot', and I don't doubt that he's a very good one. However, some of the answers he gives to his own questions in this book are ambiguous, some are dubious, and some are just plain wrong. For instance, the formula for lift is given in the book (page 4) as: 1/2R + V^2 + S + Cl
Where:
R = Density
V^2 = TAS squared
S = Wing span area
Cl = Coefficient of lift. Even if we were to ignore 'Wing span area' (by which he can be presumed to mean 'Wing plan area'), the formula is incorrect. (Replace the '+' symbols with 'x' and you're pretty much there.) Pages 13-14 see some very confused ideas about tail control-surfaces, moments and arms. I could go on. Despite the answers being fairly untrustworthy, this is a useful book, just to get the old grey matter going. If you're approaching an interview, try to find something similar. If you can't find something similar, buy this BUT remember - the questions are more use than the answers!
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Interview Material
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If you are going for am airline interview as a pilot, then this is the book for you, finding it hard to struggle through Handling the Big Jets ?? Then buy this cos all the info you need and have forgotten since ATPL days is here in a clear and concise format..... fantastic
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