Search results for ""Author Wolfgang Langewiesche""

Publisher's Note: Products purchased from Third Party sellers are not guaranteed by the publisher for quality, authenticity, or access to any online entitlements included with the product.WHAT'S IN STICK AND RUDDER: The invisible secret of all heavier-than-air flight: the Angle of Attack. What it is, and why it can't be seen. How lift is made, and what the pilot has to do with it. Why airplanes stall How do you know you're about to stall? The landing approach. How the pilot's eye functions in judging the approach. The visual clues by which an experienced pilot unconsciously judges: how you can quickly learn to use them. "The Spot that does not move." This is the first statement of this phenomenon. A foolproof method of making a landing approach across pole lines and trees. The elevator and the throttle. One controls the speed, the other controls climb and descent. Which is which? The paradox of the glide. By pointing the nose down less steeply, you descend more steeply. By pointing the nose down more steeply, you can glide further. What's the rudder for? The rudder does NOT turn the airplane the way a boat's rudder turns the boat. Then what does it do? How a turn is flown. The role of ailerons, rudder, and elevator in making a turn. The landing--how it's made. The visual clues that tell you where the ground is. The "tail-dragger" landing gear and what's tricky about it. This is probably the only analysis of tail-draggers now available to those who want to fly one. The tricycle landing gear and what's so good about it. A strong advocacy of the tricycle gear written at a time when almost all civil airplanes were taildraggers. Why the airplane doesn't feel the wind. Why the airplane usually flies a little sidewise. Plus: a chapter on Air Accidents by Leighton Collins, founder and editor of AIR FACTS. His analyses of aviation's safety problems have deeply influenced pilots and aeronautical engineers and have contributed to the benign characteristics of today's airplane. Stick and Rudder is the first exact analysis of the art of flying ever attempted. It has been continously in print for thirty-three years. It shows precisely what the pilot does when he flies, just how he does it, and why.Because the basics are largely unchanging, the book therefore is applicable to large airplanes and small, old airplanes and new, and is of interest not only to the learner but also to the accomplished pilot and to the instructor himself.When Stick and Rudder first came out, some of its contents were considered highly controversial. In recent years its formulations have become widely accepted. Pilots and flight instructors have found that the book works.Today several excellent manuals offer the pilot accurate and valuable technical information. But Stick and Rudder remains the leading think-book on the art of flying. One thorough reading of it is the equivalent of many hours of practice.

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"I am no helmeted, begoggled hero of the skies; picture me bookish, bespectacled, unable to hold even a teacup without rattling it. As a pilot, I am merely an amateur, and I know it...I shouldn't be talking. But I can't help talking. For you take the air: the thin, substanceless air that can be made to bear a man; you take America; and you take an airplane, which of all the works of man is the nearest to a living being-you take those things and mix them up, and they will act as a drug which will knock all proper reticence right out of you. And so, here I go talking..."-from America from the Air In 1927, Charles Lindbergh made his historic solo flight across the Atlantic; Amelia Earhart became the first woman to do so in 1932. And so was born the golden age of flying. Aviators became the era's new heroes and the airplane its icon. In early 1930s Chicago, a German-born graduate student became fascinated by the airplane and its usefulness as a great geographic and sociological tool. Wolfgang Langewiesche sold his car and used his meager salary to pay for flying lessons at 25 cents a minute. With the same passion America had taken to the road a decade earlier, Langewiesche took to the air. He eagerly inhaled the landscape and breathed observations about the country, writing a series of books that describe the heady excitement and freedom of flight and the stunning views of his adopted country from an entirely new vantage point-the sky. This new edited volume revives the writings from two of his now out-of-print books. America from the Air draws from Langewiesche's classic account of his early experiences as a pilot, I'll Take the High Road (first published in 1939 and praised by the New York Times as "a stirring and revealing story, told with sensitiveness and lucidity and with the warmth of a modest personal charm"), and selections from his 1951 memoir, A Flier's World, to create a distinctive book that provides a pioneering look at the American landscape as seen from the cockpit of a light plane. Langewiesche's photographs from his cross-country flights circa 1939 evoke the era. Wolfgang Langewiesche is revered among pilots for his 1944 flying primer, Stick and Rudder, currently in its seventieth printing. Considered the bible of aviation, it tells us the "how" of flying; America from the Air tells us the "why." Here his descriptions of the country offer unique perspectives on New England, the Midwest, and the Atlantic Coast from Virginia to Key West, at a time before the country was paved over by multilane expressways, suburban tract housing, and strip malls. His bird's-eye view of America takes in small farms, deserted seashores, busy railway lines, and cities in which skyscrapers were still engineering marvels. With the keen eye of a surveyor and an uncommon talent for conveying the physical sensation of flying, he describes landscape in all its beauty and detail as it rolls out beneath him, unveiling its mysteries. Langewiesche is revealed here as an infectiously enthusiastic aviator and an unrivaled observer of the American landscape. In a new foreword, Langewiesche's son, writer William Langewiesche, describes his father's love of the view from above. Hokanson and Kratz's introduction and biography update the reader, incorporating stories gleaned from recent interviews with the author.

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