Everyone knows the old one about takeoffs being optional and landings mandatory. Stopping to think about this instantly blew my mind: once that aircraft departs Terra Firma, one way or another, it’s coming back down. Cause and effect, choice and consequence.
Aviation is filled with such stark realities and its language is stocked with phraseology such as “points of no return” and so on. Unless one is suicidal or quite daft, the choices left after departure is a controlled return to earth and that’s where landing tutelage becomes important.
There are as many tips for landing as there are instructors, and some are quite good but alas a lot of them are also quite bad. I don’t like the idea, for example, of what is known as ‘dead stick’ landings to a full stall. Too many pilots of light aircraft deprive themselves of a measure of continuing control by instantly chopping off power over the numbers (or piano keys, as I read somewhere, which sounds way nicer, don’t you think?).
However, that’s a topic for another post. As I have promised at least two people so far, I am going to perform another, perhaps even illegal, duplication of some of the best landing instruction from one of the best writers I have ever read and which I immediately went out and tried. It works in Flight Simulator 2004 and it worked when I still flew Cessna 172s.
Read more…
Here are some other examples of fireworks photography, spellbinding.
Wilhelm Thalller’s Never Get Lost is an ironic tragedy: it is easily one of the best books on electronic navigation I have ever read but also one of the worst.
Thaller’s book was translated from the original German by someone he thanks in the introduction to the book. I laughed because instead, I would suggest a whipping. Hear that, Elisabeth Wagnleitner-Suppin? A sound thrashing.
Technically, the content is inspirational—wonderful illustrations with helpful markings to show how best and quickly to interpret the various instruments; repetition of principles ideas in various different ways that encourages sound understanding and the list goes on. Thaller’s assertion is that he would like for any reading pilots to able to immediately interpret and use the information presented by the instruments in much the same way an EKG is “read” by a doctor: meaning is extracted from seemingly incomprehensible data and the proper action taken.
However, the book is a terrible mishmash of bad grammar (abhorrent spelling, horrendous syntax, etc., etc.) and a near incomprehensible structure. With all these faults, this book is not the easiest to read and in fact, I’d proffer that it’s almost impossible. Almost.
When you can make some meaning out of what you’re reading, a descending clarity results. An “ah, so that’s what that is!” sort of clarity, but the amount of work one has to perform to get to this stage is immense and needlessly so hence the tragedy: for many English speakers, the concentrated amount of work needed to step over those metaphorical ‘road apples’ may deter them from getting to the real prize offered by this book.
In the hands of a more talented translator—preferably one who didn’t use on online language translator as this one seems to have—and a competent editor, this wonderful little book would easily be the best in class I personally have seen (and I’ve seen and read quite a lot). It makes me wish I could read the original German and may just be a good enough reason!
