You would need to log a thousand more hours to learn the flying savvy this book teaches! Veteran pilot writer Richard L. Collins draws on his extensive pilot-in-command experience at the controls of virtually all types of light aircraft to provide you with the techniques, performance tips, and rules-of-thumb he's learned over the years. He organizes his tip-filled text into the natural progression of a flight: ground work, takeoff, climb, en route, descent and landing. He then shifts focus to flying high-performance singles, twins, emergencies, busy airport operations, night and mountain flying, and much more, concluding with his own selections and suggestions for airplanes, instruments, and cockpit necessities.

Tips To Fly By offers techniques, performance tips and rules of thumb:

• How to devise a tailor-made preflight checklist for your machine, your flight, and yourself.
• When to change altitude for optimum fuel management; effects of loading on performance.
• What to watch for when flying low and slow; stall/spin avoidance.
• How to move up to higher-performance single and twin-engine aircraft.
• Why night flying is really IFR flying.
• When, why, and how to practice flying skills; obvious reasons often ignored.

Author's Forward:

"Flying requires a good balance of mental agility and mechanical grace. Pilots who fly well think quickly and operate the machinery with a fine touch. On a day with reasonable flying conditions a passenger hardly feels any sensation of flight after a trip with a good pilot. Everything goes smoothly. When conditions are not quite so reasonable, or when there's a glitch, a talented pilot has the ability to maximize the things going for the flight and minimize the things going against it. Like a cat, he lands on his feet.

Most people who fly could do so as well as the best. They don't, though, and this is a primary reason that the general aviation accident record is much worse than it needs to be.

One reason for sloppy or lackadaisical flying is found in the training process. While it does cover all the facts a pilot needs and more or less forces the rote learning of those facts through the medium of the knowledge exam and checkride, the training system often works on an impersonal basis. Many flight instructors do not have a broad range of personal experience in using airplanes to pass along in addition to what is contained in training manuals and courses. Some make the effort to humanize training, and should be commended for it, but it remains that a lot of new pilots know what is true but don't know why it is true. They know something about how you are supposed to fly an airplane, but they don't know why you are supposed to fly it that way or what happens if you don't.

A new private pilot summed this up when he said he felt superficially trained because of a lack of exposure to valuable experience. What he wanted was an outline of the things he would learn from experience in his first 1,000 hours of flying. This book is based on experience, and it is my hope that the pilot who mentioned the need will find here 1,000 hours worth of hands-on flying experience.

Discipline is another part of the equation. This is the only place Ill use that word in this book, because my astute colleague Gordon Baxter chides me for using it too much, and I don't want the book to take on the tone of a sermon. I do ask you to remember it, though, because putting yourself in the proper frame of mind is extremely important in flying. To fly well, we have to demand of ourselves nothing short of the best". -- Richard L. Collins

Author Profile: Practically every pilot in the USA is familiar with the work of Richard L. Collins. He has devoted his life to aviation, logging over 18,500 flight hours in almost every type of aircraft, including the Concorde, and writing about it in over 900 articles and 11 books. Associated with FLYING magazine for 20 years as editor and editor-in-chief, Collins moved to AOPA Pilot in 1988 as publisher and editor-in-chief. He is currently editor-at-large for Flying and editorial consultant to Sporty's Academy. Collins has also served on many government and aviation industry committees, has won numerous aviation awards, and continues to do extensive research in aviation safety.

Format: Softcover, 224 pages, Indexed.