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6 books match the query 'Airplanes'

cover of Fatal Words: Communication Clashes and Aircraft Crashes

Fatal Words

Communication Clashes and Aircraft Crashes

Steven Cushing

University of Chicago Press, 1994

On March 27, 1977, 583 people died when KLM and Pan Am 747s collided on a crowded, foggy runway in Tenerife, the Canary Islands. The cause, a miscommunication between the pilot and the air traffic controller. The pilot radioed, "We are now at takeoff," meaning that the plane was lifting off, but the tower controller misunderstood and thought the plane was waiting on the runway.

In Fatal Words, Steven Cushing explains how miscommunication has led to dozens of aircraft disasters, and he proposes innovative solutions for preventing them. He examines ambiguities in language when aviation jargon and colloquial English are mixed, when a word is used that has different meanings, and when different words are used that sound alike. To remedy these problems, Cushing proposes a visual communication system and a computerized voice mechanism to help clear up confusing language.

Fatal Words is an accessible explanation of some of the most notorious aircraft tragedies of our time, and it will appeal to scholars in communications, linguistics, and cognitive science, to aviation experts, and to general readers.
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cover of Introduction to Airborne Radar

Introduction to Airborne Radar

Geroge W. Stimson

The Institution of Engineering and Technology, 1998

Introduction to Airborne Radar is the revision of the classic book privately published by Hughes Aircraft Company in 1983. Lavishly produced in full color, the book was quite unlike any commercially published radar book produced by the major technical publishers. The combination of clear, understandable writing and the unparalleled illustrations established the text-reference as a 'must-have' for engineers, technicians, pilots, and even sales and marketing people within the radar and aerospace industry. The book was authored by veteran Hughes engineer and Technical Manager George W. Stimson, a publications specialist. Individual chapters were thoroughly reviewed by the appropriate experts within the Hughes Radar Systems Group. The book was initially available 1983-1987 only to those within the Hughes family: employees and customers, primarily the military. Restriction was lifted in 1987. Hughes went through three printings and 40,000 copies 1983-1993, mostly by word-of-mouth testimonials and demand. Upon retirement from Hughes, George Stimson successfully negotiated for the rights to the book and made an agreement with SciTech Publishing to do a major revision of the text to update it. The resulting Second Edition has been overwhelmingly positive and a best-seller. Second Edition The revision is extensive: thirteen entirely new chapters cover the technological advances over the fifteen years since publication, two chapters considered obsolete have been deleted entirely, three chapters are extensively rewritten and updated, two chapters have been given new sections, and fourteen chapters have been given minor tweaks, corrections, and polishing. The book has grown from 32 chapters to 44 chapters in 584 efficiently-designed pages. Efforts have been made to bring more even-handed coverage to radars developed outside of Hughes Aircraft, while older and less important Hughes radars have been deleted or abbreviated. Chapter 44 catalogs many of the cutting edge radars in functioning aircraft and near-service aircraft in early stages of production. The book's appeal is to a diverse audience: from military pilots and radar officers eager to gain a sound technical understanding of the complex systems that their lives depend upon, on up through technicians, marketing, and sales people, to the radar system design specialists, who may 'know all that stuff' but who deeply admire the expression and thus use the book to teach others who have questions. The market encompasses companies directly involved in the radar business and those on the periphery, college professors of engineering and physics themselves, along with students in aviation, aeronautics, and electromagnetics and radar courses. The cross-disciplinary and multi-level demand for the book shows that the book should not be pigeon-holed as just a radar book for electrical engineers. Virtually anybody with a knowledge of high school algebra, trigonometry, and physics will be able to read and absorb most of the material.
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cover of Prairie Sky: A Pilot's Reflections on Flying and the Grace of Altitude

Prairie Sky

A Pilot's Reflections on Flying and the Grace of Altitude

W. Scott Olsen

University of Missouri Press, 2013

“It’s almost like ballet. Preflight. Starting. Warm-up. The voices from the control tower—the instructions. Taxiing. The rush down the runway. Airborne. There are names for every move. The run-up. Position and hold. Every move needs to be learned, practiced, made so familiar you feel the patterns in every other thing you do. It’s technical, yes. But there is a grace to getting metal and bone into the sky.”

Prairie Sky is a celebration of curiosity and a book for explorers. In this collection of contemplative essays, Scott Olsen invites readers to view the world from a pilot’s seat, demonstrating how, with just a little bit of altitude, the world changes, new relationships become visible, and new questions seem to rise up from the ground.

Whether searching for the still-evident shores of ancient lakes, the dustbowl-era shelterbelt supposed to run the length of the country, or the even more elusive understandings of physics and theology, Olsen shares the unique perspective and insight allowed to pilots.

Prairie Sky explores the reality as well as the metaphor of flight: notions of ceaseless time and boundless space, personal interior and exterior vision, social history, meteorology, and geology. Olsen takes readers along as he chases a new way of looking at the physical world and wonders aloud about how the whole planet moves in interconnected ways not visible from the ground. While the northern prairie may call to mind images of golden harvests and summer twilight such images do not define the region. The land bears marks left by gut-shaking thunderstorms, hard-frozen rivers, sweeping floods, and hurricane-size storms. Olsen takes to the midwestern sky to confront the ordinary world and reveals the magic--the wondrous and unique sights visible from the pilot’s seat of a Cessna.

Like Antoine de Saint-Exupery’s classic work Wind, Sand and Stars, Olsen’s Prairie Sky reveals the heart of what it means to fly. In the grand romantic tradition of the travel essay, it opens the dramatic paradoxes of self and collective, linear and circular, the heart and the border.

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cover of The Airplane in American Culture

The Airplane in American Culture

Dominick A. Pisano, Editor

University of Michigan Press, 2003

Few journeys have had as great an impact on American culture as Orville Wright's first flight at Kitty Hawk in 1903—a twelve-second, one-hundred-twenty-foot trip that has captivated American thought and influenced American life ever since.
Although countless books for aviation buffs have appeared since World War II, none has attempted to place the airplane in its full social, cultural, and interdisciplinary context until now. The first book of its kind, The Airplane in American Culture presents essays by distinguished contributors including historians, literary scholars, scholars of American studies, art historians, and museum professionals that explore a range of topics, including the connections between flying and race and gender; aviation's role in forming perceptions of the landscape; the airplane's significance to the culture of war; and the influence of flight on literature and art.
A must-read collection for anyone fascinated by the airplane, The Airplane in American Culture represents a dramatic new approach to writing the history of aviation, and makes an important contribution to American social and cultural history.
Dominick A. Pisano is Curator of the Aeronautics Department at the National Air and Space Museum, Smithsonian Institution.
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cover of WASP of the Ferry Command: Women Pilots, Uncommon Deeds

WASP of the Ferry Command

Women Pilots, Uncommon Deeds

Sarah Byrn Rickman

University of North Texas Press, 2016

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cover of Why Don't Jumbo Jets Flap Their Wings?: Flying Animals, Flying Machines, and How They Are Different

Why Don't Jumbo Jets Flap Their Wings?

Flying Animals, Flying Machines, and How They Are Different

David E. Alexander

Rutgers University Press, 2009

What do a bumble bee and a 747 jet have in common? It’s not a trick question. The fact is they have quite a lot in common. They both have wings. They both fly. And they’re both ideally suited to it. They just do it differently.

Why Don’t Jumbo Jets Flap Their Wings? offers a fascinating explanation of how nature and human engineers each arrived at powered flight. What emerges is a highly readable account of two very different approaches to solving the same fundamental problems of moving through the air, including lift, thrust, turning, and landing. The book traces the slow and deliberate evolutionary process of animal flight—in birds, bats, and insects—over millions of years and compares it to the directed efforts of human beings to create the aircraft over the course of a single century.

Among the many questions the book answers:
  • Why are wings necessary for flight?
  • How do different wings fly differently?
  • When did flight evolve in animals?
  • What vision, knowledge, and technology was needed before humans could learn to fly?
  • Why are animals and aircrafts perfectly suited to the kind of flying they do?

David E. Alexander first describes the basic properties of wings before launching into the diverse challenges of flight and the concepts of flight aerodynamics and control to present an integrated view that shows both why birds have historically had little influence on aeronautical engineering and exciting new areas of technology where engineers are successfully borrowing ideas from animals.
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