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A friend of mine wrote:

"I don't know whether you recognized the name of the author. He is a well-known aviation writer and journalist, and the son of Wolfgang Langeweische, author of the book Stick and Rudder. Stick and Rudder has been the bible for pilots of how planes fly since its publication in the 1940s."

Stick and Rudder, Wolfgang Langewiesch, 1944.

Understanding how something like powered flight works—the combination of science, engineering, process, self-control, intuition, on and on—is highly transferable to nearly any other acquirable skill.

this is a good compliment to Stick and Rudder: https://www.amazon.com/Compleat-Taildragger-Pilot-Harvey-Plo... if you are interested in getting into actual "stick and rudder" flying - tailwheel flying (while a bit of a dying art) is kind of key for all test, aerobatic, bush, and most "fun" types of flying where your "involved" with the machine

Thanks for the answers!

The completely "hands off" (the yoke) startled me. They concluded that this was the safest approach to teach: all turns with rudder, and a predetermined trim and power. Post instruction, they allowed pilots to try their own approach, and say that the two who tried to control oscillations with the yoke "realized almost at once [that this resulted in more extreme oscillations] and both subjects immediately released the yoke and continued through the remainder of the steps with 'Hands Off'."

Having just read Langewiesche's Stick and Rudder, with the emphasis that all turns should always be coordinated, I found this very surprising. The study suggested that the instructor use this explanation: "Bear in mind that this whole procedure is a 'gimmick' designed to save your life. If it is easier and safer for us to make a 'sloppy' turn in order to get the job done, then that is the best way under the circumstances."

Oh my, you weren't kidding:

On the last day of May in 2009, as night enveloped the airport in Rio de Janeiro, the 216 passengers waiting to board a flight to Paris could not have suspected that they would never see daylight again, or that many would sit strapped to their seats for another two years before being found dead in the darkness, 13,000 feet below the surface of the Atlantic Ocean. But that is what happened.

And I thought that name sounded familiar. William is the son of Wolfgang Langewiesche, author of one of the books that taught me how to fly: Stick and Rudder.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stick_and_Rudder

Tail-draggers died out for larger aircraft partly because the slanted cabin when on the ground was inconvenient. The DC-3 was the last successful tail-dragger airliner.

Wolfgang Langewiesche, in his 1944 classic, "Stick and Rudder", writes that the tail-dragger arrangement is a poor landing gear, but a good takeoff gear for underpowered aircraft. It gives the effect of flaps on takeoff for planes that don't have flaps.
Tail-draggers are prone to nose-plant accidents and ground loops.[1]

Worst landing gear ever - the U-2. Two inline wheel sets.[2] That's the result of extreme weight reduction.

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=q5trygRQaV0
[2] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-ELjCkG4Gl0

Exactly this.

The Langewiesche legacy goes back to his father Wolfgang Langewiesche, who is also a terrific writer, incidentally about probably still the best book about flying fixed wings, Stick and Rudder (1936).

But flying has moved on a lot since then. Although I also appreciate "The story of Mel", computing has moved on so far from moving some bits and bytes on a drum memory, that I absolutely prefer someone writing readable code today to someone who produces unreadable, but performant code (spare a few niches of inner loop optimization).

The same goes for flying back now and then. When there's not just "Stick and Rudder" in a modern airplane, but caring for massively diverse aspects such as ATC, passenger air quality, airspace control or fuel optimization, I don't need specialists. I need competent generalists.

Of course it makes for a nice hero story if a pilot just makes it to the runway because they took an airliner into a forward slip like the Gimli Glider, but the point is that they absolutely should not have to.

Humans are not meant for sensing to fly. The average VFR pilot loses not just orientation, but control over the airplane an average of around 178 seconds (!) after going into a cloud.

We need less heroes and more engineers who can build reliable automated safety systems.

Check out page 126 of Stick And Rudder for an intuitive illustration of why dihedral works.

From Stick and Rudder by Wolfgang Langewiesche, page 9, published 1944:

The main fact of all heavier-than-air flight is this: the wing keeps the airplane up by pushing the air down.

It shoves the air down with its bottom surface, and it pulls the air down with its top surface; the latter action is the more important. But the really important thing to understand is that the wing, in whatever fashion, makes the air go down. In exerting a downward force upon the air, the wing receives an upward counterforce--by the same principle, known as Newton's law of action and reaction, which makes a gun recoil as it shoves the bullet out forward; and which makes the nozzle of a fire hose press backward heavily against the fireman as it shoots out a stream of water forward. Air is heavy; sea-level air weights about 2 pounds per cubic yard; thus, as your wings give a downward push to a cubic yard after cubic yard of that heavy stuff, they get upward reactions that are equally hefty.

That's what keeps an airplane up. Newton's law says that, if the wing pushes the air down, the air must push the wing up. It also puts the same thing the other way 'round: if the wing is to hold the airplane up in the fluid, ever-yielding air, it can do so only by pushing the air down. All the fancy physics of Bernoulli's Theorem, all the highbrow math of the circulation theory, all the diagrams showing the airflow on a wing--all that is only an elaboration and more detailed description of just how Newton's law fulfills itself--for instance, the rather interesting but (for the pilot) really quite useless observation that the wing does most of its downwashing work by suction, with its top surface. ...

Thus, if you will forget some of this excessive erudition, a wing becomes much easier to understand; it is in the last analysis nothing but an air deflector. It is an inclined plane, cleverly curved, to be sure, and elaborately streamlined, but still essentially an inclined plane. That's, after all, why that whole fascinating contraption of ours is called an air-plane.