Understanding the Sky

by Dennis Pagen

This book eloquently compresses 20 years of ultralight experience and meteorological research by respected author Dennis Pagen. It explains what and how weather affects us. If you've ever wondered why... This description may be from another edition of this product.

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0936310103
• ISBN13: 9780936310107
• Release Date: January 1992
• Publisher: Sport Aviation Pubns
• Length: 275 Pages
• Weight: 3.05 lbs.
• Dimensions: 9.3" x 1.0" x 6.3"

Customer Reviews

A must for safety

I recomend this for anyone paragliding but even more so for powered paraglider pilots. Typically if you are new to a free flight site you are never the first one in the air. When you are powered paragliding you will often find yourself launching alone or with a small group and someone has to go first. Wouldn't you like to know what is going on above you? This is the book that will explain the air and how to predict what is actually going on without throwing yourself into it. I can say I've stayed grounded more then once because of the info in the book only to find a front pass though minutes later.

Better photos would help

As a paragliding pilot, I bought this book hoping to learn more about the weather and to improve my flying skills. It's a great book, content-wise. It's written specifically for the pilots and is very practicable. It also covers pretty much everything a pilot may need. The book did help me learn more about the weather, although not as much as I had expected, but that's probably because of the difficulty of the subject matter rather than the quality of the book. Weather is a very complicated thing and I think it's only through long experience that one can learn its various tricks. So don't expect to become expert at finding thermals after reading this book. What this book does is it teaches you basic theory and provides lots of information of weather phenomena that pilots can take advantage of in theor flying, in a way understandable to all of us average paragliding or hanggliding pilots. The problem is that in real life weather is often more complicated than that.My only gripe with the book is not about contents, but the quality of the printed material and binding. The photos and illustrations are not very good, which is quite bad because they are very important in the learning process. For example, it's hard to distinguish between different types of clouds just by looking at their sketchy pictures or the bleak black-and-white photos, some of which are so bleak you almost can't see anything at all. Similarly, it was sometimes hard to make sense of the author's explanations of different weather phenomena, largely because of the poor quality of supporting illustrations. The book's binding was quite weak, and mine split in two just after I read the book once. The book intended for practising pilots who may be carrying it in their backpacks everywhere or even in their harnesses during flights could have a more sturdy binding.Having said that, I still think it's an excellent book and I would recommend it to all pilots interested in knowing more about the weather.

Informative and enjoyable

The book takes a very complicated subject and boils it down to the bare essentials necessary to have a working knowledge of weather. Quite a feat! Of course it helps to have an interest in weather from a hang glider pilot's perspective.