Performance Pilot: Skills, Techniques, and Strategies to Maximize Your Flying Performance

This is not so much a book about flying an airplane as it is about becoming a better pilot.The book introduces many simple exercises and warm-up procedures for increasing alertness, coordination, and sensitivity.The same techniques would apply to an astronaut, race-car-driver, or even many sports.It's a book about how to get sharp and stay there.Get the book, read it, and follow the lessons and I dare you to try and say it didn't make you better at what you do.

Muy buenos temas que se tocan en el libro

This reviewer was a recreational flyer in the ‘60s. At that time there was very little literature on the subject: “The New Private Pilot” 1959, published by Pan American Navigation Service, was written to study for the pilot examinations and tests. The rules for flying are embodied in the “Federal Aviation Regulations”(formalized as such in 1958). For a teenage autodidact in the ‘60s, trying to learn private piloting from these tomes was much like studying a foreign culture through reading the Dictionary. The books were supplemental to course study, which was also focused on passing the written and practical flying tests.“Performance Pilot”, published some 58 years after “The New Private Pilot” is all that the Amazon reviewers have praised it for. From my experience. it ads significantly to the succession of aviation books following the ‘60s. Some of these of note, “Weather Flying”, Robert N. Buck, 1970, known as the master of the subject, I was surprised that the date was later than I suspected; “Say again Please” 1995,is more than communications, it opens the student to the customs and protocols of flying (remember studying the foreign culture noted above); “The Killing Zone: How and Why Pilots Die” 2001, describes the period from 50 to 350 flight hours that are the deadliest for pilots simply because the pilot has left the instructor’s nest and is alone for the next 300 hours. There are others.Performance Pilot fills a needed view of the mental and physical performance of the pilot. The cockpit, as well as the time before and after a flight, is now a very busy place as well as the airspace around it. A pilot today needs to learn and improve every hour he or she is in the air Authored by an auto racing coach and a pilot who also races cars and airplanes, Performance Pilot is a natural to add to this knowledge. Read it annually along with your physical.

Great info but it's a tiny booklet filled with black and white pictures, and I found that many of the pictures are just there to fill in the space.

This book gives us pilots access to the tricks and techniques used by competitive sportspeople. Like a personal performance coach it offers specific exercises to develop our awareness and skills, especially for when the chips are down. It's an easy read, yet it is based on some quite complex science and psychology. The practices it teaches would certainly benefit any kind of pilot, at any level. Perhaps in time this book will also be seen as a bit of a wake-up-call for our industry, where pilots have generally developed these particular skills through trial and error rather than science.Jim, F/O 737