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Cockpit Confidential

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

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Cockpit Confidential

By: Patrick Smith
Narrated by: Charlie Thurston
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About this listen

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.

©2013 Patrick Smith (P)2016 Tantor Anxiety Disorders Engineering Mental Health Personal Development Psychology & Mental Health Travel Writing & Commentary Health Aviation Funny

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Critic reviews

"Smith paints an unflinching portrait of modern air travel with several fresh and unexpected insights." ( Publishers Weekly)
All stars
Most relevant
A detailed insight into the nature of flight from a piolets perspective. Overlong but interesting.

full of details

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Amazing listen for those curious about the finer details of what goes on behind the scenes in passenger air transport, from the lens of a pilot

Brilliant listen for the curious air traveller

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Overall too world weary for me. The book delves into the nuts and bolts of commercial aircraft and the airline industry and offers a lot of information and insight. But it's too negative too be an enjoyable listen on the whole and gets borderline conspiracy theorist when it comes to airport security. It is genuinely funny now and then and there is the relief of the odd anecdote but not enough to carry you through the dark clouds. The narration is a bit flat which doesn't help.

Woe is me, says the airline pilot.

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Super duper dooo! I love airplanes and I can also tell the difference between the 727-100 and the 727-200. One problem: the A380 is not ugly.

It's good. like Really Good

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I was learning so much helpful stuff until I got to the chapter where he lists all the plane crashes. I’m not sure what the point is of this, he certainly doesn’t follow it up with a reassuring payoff. A future chapter does cover the stats of flying but I was left with more anxiety of things I’d never considered. As if this wasn’t enough there was a chapter with “The worst plane disasters ever” which was described as “tastefully edited” But I’ll never know, because I put the book down then, never to return.
I think the early chapters have some interesting information and I’m fine with the performance, but I’ve left the book feeling anxious about new things now.

It was all going so well…

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