Ask the Pilot

5 comments

I've enjoyed reading Patrick Smith's regular column at Salon.com called Ask the Pilot. He's a commercial pilot who writes a regular question-and-answer type column for the news site that addresses people's common questions about flying. It's a good mix of technical flight explanations and opinionated editorials about the airline industry and modern day flight.

I recently noticed that he's published a book filled with this type of writing, so of course I bought a copy. From what I've read so far, it's highly entertaining and educational. If you fly on a regular basis, you'll learn a lot about what's going on behind the scenes. Which pilots are most respected, what flights pilots like the best, why routes are arranged the way they are, why your plane suddenly aborted a landing, and so on. It's an honest behind-the-scenes view from the pilot's perspective.

Smith's own opinions on which planes are the most attractive and the dire straits of modern aircraft aesthetic are insightful and very entertaining. Anyhow, I look forward to getting to the back cover.

Photo from iStockPhoto.com

Comments

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Chris -

How far from the airport is the landing gear lowered? Are there any exceptions to how far out it is lowered?
Thanks

Daniel Burka -

Chris, I've got no clue, why don't you go ask the author over at Salon?

paul sardo -

hello. i am trying to solve a dispute and you just may be the right person to finally put an end to this craziness. an international flight from newark/ney york to lisbon, portugal takes roughly 6 hours give or take a few minutes. a return flight from portugal back to new york takes 7 plus. it seems to be almost the same flight pattern so why is that?

Daniel Burka -

Paul, I am not the author of the book above who is an expert on aviation. However, Google (which is the expert on everything) has a good answer to your question with a long discussion following. Apparently it's mostly prevailing winds.

hobz -

http://blog.here.ws

hey, how do u know about the pilot's abbreviations for A-Z?

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Daniel Burka

My name is Daniel Burka. I'm a web designer living in San Francisco. Currently, I'm one of the founders of Milk Inc.. For several years I was the creative director at Digg and previous to Milk, I was the director of design at Tiny Speck. I grew up in PEI, Canada, where I was one of the founders of silverorange. Aside from obsessing about interface design and css selectors, I'm a frequently-falling rock climber, a lazy cyclist, and an often out-of-bounds disc golfer.

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I'm a web designer living in San Francisco, California. I sometimes get the chance to present lectures and workshops at conferences around the world, where I speak about iterative design strategies, designing for large online communities, and more broadly about interface design for web applications. I've posted many of the slides from past presentations I've done on Slideshare.

Currently, I'm the director of design at a small gaming startup called Tiny Speck. Until October 2009, I was the creative director at Digg. I was also one of the co-founders of the social content-sharing site Pownce, which is now a part (heh heh) of Six Apart. Back in 1999, I helped found silverorange, a stellar web development and design firm based in Prince Edward Island, Canada. I continue to work with silverorange, but as an inactive partner.

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