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    Cockpit Confidential: Everything You Need to Know About Air Travel: Questions, Answers, and Reflections
    Cockpit Confidential: Everything You Need to Know About Air Travel: Questions, Answers, and Reflections
    Cockpit Confidential: Everything You Need to Know About Air Travel: Questions, Answers, and Reflections
    Audiobook11 hours

    Cockpit Confidential: Everything You Need to Know About Air Travel: Questions, Answers, and Reflections

    Written by Patrick Smith

    Narrated by Charlie Thurston

    4/5

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    About this audiobook

    For millions of people, travel by air is a confounding, uncomfortable, and even fearful experience. Patrick Smith, airline pilot and author of the Web's popular Ask the Pilot feature, separates fact from fallacy and tells you everything you need to know . . .

    How planes fly, and a revealing look at the men and women who fly them
    Straight talk on turbulence, pilot training, and safety
    The real story on congestion, delays, and the dysfunction of the modern airport
    The myths and misconceptions of cabin air and cockpit automation
    Terrorism in perspective, and a provocative look at security
    Airfares, seating woes, and the pitfalls of airline customer service

    Cockpit Confidential covers not only the nuts and bolts of flying, but also the grand theater of air travel, from airport architecture to inflight service to the excitement of travel abroad. It's a thoughtful, funny, at times deeply personal look into the strange and misunderstood world of commercial flying.
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherTantor Media, Inc
    Release dateFeb 23, 2016
    ISBN9781515973782
    Author

    Patrick Smith

    Patrick Smith is a New York Times bestselling author, airline pilot, air travel writer, and the host of www.askthepilot.com. He has visited more than seventy countries and always asks for a window seat. He lives in Somerville, Massachusetts.

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    Reviews for Cockpit Confidential

    4/5

    80 ratings7 reviews

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    • 5/5
      I’m currently training towards my commercial pilot license and this book gave some fantastic insights into the industry. Light hearted, honest, incidentally educational and easy to understand for those not technically/mechanically inclined.
    • 5/5
      I thoroughly enjoyed this book. I'm a fearful flyer but also a curious citizen, and I feel that after reading this book I got a very good inside into commercial Aviation. I also really enjoyed the style of the author, his detailed explanations are sprinkled with humorous and ironic remarks, that made the read so much more pleasurable. I highly recommend this book.
    • 2/5
      Surprisingly informational for a fluff piece of easy reading. Sounds like a backhanded compliment but I mean it in a positive way. Unfortunately almost half of it is incoherent ramblings that may fit on a blog but not in a book (like an in depth discussion of author's opinions of logos).
    • 4/5
      Great read about airplanes and flying... explained (mostly) in words even everyday readers can understand!
    • 5/5
      Absorbing, informative, quirky and hugely entertaining warts & all expose of the airline industry. Smith is a celebrated blogger with a long experience of both the glamourous and decidedly less glamourous sides of the aviation industry, and he answers all the questions that nervous or curious fliers have always wanted to ask, and along the way kills forever the notion that being an airline pilot is a glamorous occupation. Long hours, hard work, long separations from home and family and, particularly in the brutally cut-throat regional airline sector, miserably low pay. He throws in anecdotes from his own career to illustrate both the excitement and the banality of flight, exposes the secrets of air travel (what do airport abbreviations actually mean, can you still visit the cockpit (yes, you can, at least while the plane is still on the ground), what does "disarm cabin doors and cross-check" mean, what do pilots carry in their bags and so on. He also unleashes on his pet peeves, most notably the time-wasting airport security since 9/11, which he contends is mostly useless anyway. He also broaches the subject of airplane safety, solemnly listing the worst air accidents in history (more than 2500 lives lost in 10 crashes), and devotes a special mention to the worst of all, the Tenerife crash in 1977 which killed 583. He also rates the world's airlines on their service, and somewhat more humourously, on the attractiveness or otherwise of their livery. Fascinating, informative and useful book.
    • 4/5
      The book is mainly a compilation of write in questions from regular folks about all topics connected with commercial aviation. Smith comes across as a top notch pilot but also a superb writer with a very readable and straight forward style. He addresses about everything one could ask concerning air travel. He said he would stay away from the techie stuff but at times drifts into it. What's particularly good in his writing is he discusses those unknowns we all ponder, sometimes with white knuckles on the armrests and our knees up to our adam's apples compliments of the airlines.
    • 5/5
      I greatly enjoyed Patrick Smith's "inside" look at commercial airlines, which covered a number of areas of the industry in an interesting and accessible manner. I appreciated this updated version which covers events through 2012, though much of what is in this great read would still be fascinating and accurate once the current edition is no longer brand new. I jumped right into the book after picking it up at the bookstore. While I had thumbed through it at B&N, I didn't read the table of contents carefully, but saw enough of interest for me to shell out the $14.99. While reading the book, I remember thinking: "I hope he will address that question I always had about...". And do you know what? He never disappointed. That was gratifying and drove home the point to me that the author tried to really cover a wide swathe of questions, while keeping the content manageable and the book readable. The book is very thorough, at least from this occasional flyer's point of view. I have taken enough flights in my life (40-50 flights) to have some questions about how everything works in the civil aviation world, but am not seasoned or technical enough to know a lot of the answers.Mr. Smith, a veteran pilot, starts off by providing a helpful introduction to the mechanics of flying and explains some of the differences between various airplanes. This also allows him to go into a bit of aviation history, which I also enjoyed. A majority of the book is presented as question and answer, presumably with questions he has received via his "Ask the Pilot" series at Salon.com. He provides just enough personal history and experiences throughout to bring certain topics to life without making it a book just about him. He seems a fairly humble man, who has a real love for flying. I greatly appreciated his explanation of why he loves flying and what got him into the industry. "...As both author and pilot, my infatuation with flight goes beyond the airplane itself, encompassing the fuller, richer drama of getting from here to there -- the "theater" of air travel, as I like to call it." He also writes: "The disconnect between air travel and culture seems to me wholly unnatural, yet we've seen a virtually clean break." I think this is a very unfortunate truth. It perhaps shouldn't have shocked me when he stated that most pilots don't care much about their destinations and many are not travelers in the experiential sense. And many of those passengers who are using the airplane as a means to get somewhere only see it as that and don't appreciate it for all the technical and logistical aspects that make it possible. It is a little disheartening to me, since I still remember when getting there was part of the adventure. Flying commercially these days just doesn't have the same attraction, perhaps because accessibility to inexpensive tickets has literally and figuratively cheapened the experience, but also because those cheaper tickets have come at a cost of comfort and ease. Mr. Smith is not slow to point out the role the airlines and TSA have had in making flying less attractive and less fun as the years go by. He is certainly not an apologist for the airlines, but he does make some valid points to answer the common critiques one hears from the flying public. The book discusses pilot and crew culture, the process of becoming a pilot, and how pilots actually get us from point A to B. Famous (and some not-so-famous) air disasters are explained, as well as the developments regarding airport and airplane security. Some may find that he goes on a bit about his opinion regarding increased security and which methods actually help protect us from terrorist attacks. As I agreed with 99% of his sentiments, it didn't bother me at all. And regardless of whether you agree completely with him or not, I think most will accept that he presents some very valid arguments. Actually, I felt that it validated some of my long-held opinions on this topic and helped to further articulate them for me. Mr. Smith also takes a look at the airlines, their successes and failures (in staying afloat financially, in re-branding and in actual flight safety). Probably the only complaint I have -- and I imagine that this was a publisher's decision rather than the author's decision -- is that there are no diagrams or photos. When discussing the various parts of the plane (or the differences between their general shapes) and movements of certain equipment, or the evolution of airline logos, or a number of other aspects of flying, it would have been extremely helpful to have something graphical on the page or in a series of plates somewhere else in the book. This was probably a cost issue, especially since some of these diagrams would be best in color. I found myself going to Wikipedia to help this visually-inclined reader. Again, I do not fault Mr. Smith, but find this to be the main -- and probably only -- negative this book has.I often enjoy the "inside the industry" books and this is probably among the best. While parts would likely be too basic for aficionados, I recommend readers of this type of book who have any interest whatsoever in the airline industry to give "Cockpit Confidential" a look. Even if you know quite a bit about the industry, you are likely to learn something new in this quick and satisfying read. The reviews I have seen have been overwhelmingly positive, and I am certainly in agreement with those reviewers. The next time I fly, I will be so much more aware and will probably enjoy flying all the more because of it...even with the cramped seating, extra charges and delays.