Best books for beginning pilots!?

M

MidwestBob1389

Filing Flight Plan
Joined
Jan 29, 2025
Messages
28
Display Name
Display name:
MidwestBob1389
I'm trying to get back to my reading days of a book a week..(doubtful i will ever get back to that but we are trying!!!) And I have yet to fly in the cockpit, but I have dreamed of it for sometime. I was just curious as to what books helped you train the best? What was the most informative and what was mostly used as a paper weight?
Thank you kindly!
 
Stick and Rudder is a good book, but not necessarily the best book for beginner pilots who want to control the airplane, but may not need to learn aerodynamics yet.

The books you *need* to read right now
The course books for your pilot ground school
FAR/AIM, Far parts 61 and 91 (probably part of your pilot ground school).
The POH for the airplane you're flying
The Airplane Flying handbook https://www.faa.gov/regulations_policies/handbooks_manuals/aviation

Unfortunately, all of these are sloggy books. They're dense and written with an assumption of a little knowledge, but what they teach is important to being a good pilot.
 
MidwestBob1389 said:
I'm trying to get back to my reading days of a book a week..(doubtful i will ever get back to that but we are trying!!!) And I have yet to fly in the cockpit, but I have dreamed of it for sometime. I was just curious as to what books helped you train the best? What was the most informative and what was mostly used as a paper weight?
Thank you kindly!
Click to expand...

Gotta be brutally honest here. The book that will get you the furthest toward achieving the goal of earning a private pilot's license is something like this (or the one your flight school or CFI recommends) : https://a.co/d/1To8RiO

712nH87NhFL._SL1500_.jpg
 
There is a lot of free material on the FAA web site, and a lot of books, that will help you in your journey. Most of them are dry. Like Sahara dry. Will put you to sleep dry.

For someone who's just starting out, that sort of thing does not lead to good retention, meaning you'll have to slog through it AGAIN after a while to get more to stick. I greatly prefer the treatment by Rod Machado, with lots of humor and illustration that will not only keep you awake, it'll help you learn. https://www.aircraftspruce.com/catalog/bvpages/rodmachado_13-24374.php

Until you get in the cockpit, there's still going to be a limited amount of understanding and retention, so I would not recommend burning yourself out trying to read every ground school/how to book ever made. Consume some things that are more about the romance of flying, and remember why you want to do it! That's a much better way to keep motivated. Flight of Passage by Rinker Buck, Flying Carpet: The Soul of an Airplane by Greg Brown, Fate is the Hunter by Ernie Gann, and if you finish all of those there's probably lots of good stuff in most of the stuff here, here, and here. I also greatly enjoyed Jimmy Doolittle's autobiography, I Could Never Be So Lucky Again.

Tangentially related, if you're interested in WWII aviation, Serenade to the Big Bird by Bert Stiles is unlike any other such book I've ever read, and of course Unbroken.

You should also check out the documentary One Six Right. It's got lots of fantastic flying and stories in it.
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Back
Top