Welcome to a collection of Rod Machado's most popular aviation articles and stories from the last 15 years. Rod Machado's Plane Talk contains nearly 100 articles covering flights of fun and knowledge that will stimulate your aviation brain and tickle your funny bone. In addition to the educational topics listed below, this 456 page book contains articles on topics such as higher aviation learning, the value of aviation history, aviation literature, aviation art and how an artist's perspective can help you better understand weather. You'll also find more than a few articles written just to make you laugh.

Here's What's Inside

How to Assess and Manage Aviation Risks
Learn how safe pilots think, how to apply the safety strategy used by General Jimmy Doolittle (known as the master of the calculated risk), how famed gunfighter Wyatt Earp can help you cope with aviation's risks, how misleading aviation statistics can be and why flying isn't as dangerous as some folks say it is.

Several Techniques for Making Better Cockpit Decisions
Discover how to use your inner copilot in the cockpit and the value of one good question asked upside down.

New Ways to Help You Cope With Temptation
Fly safer by developing an aviation code of ethics, understand how human nature can trick you into flying beyond your limits, why good pilots are prejudiced and how a concept like honor will protect you while aloft.

How to Use Your Brain for a Change
You can learn faster by understanding how the learning curve--the brain's performance chart--is affected by the little lies we tell ourselves, the mistakes we need to make, our need to please our instructors, and simulator and memory training.

The Truth About Flying, Anxiety and Fear
Learn why it's often the safest of pilots that make excuses instead of flights, why anxiety should be treated as a normal part of flying, and a three-step process to avoiding panic in the cockpit.

How to Handle First Time Flyers and Anxious Passengers
Discover how to behave around new passengers, how to avoid most common mistakes that scare passengers in airplanes and how to reduce the cockpit stress between pilot and spouse.

Favorite Skills Used By Good Pilots
Learn why good pilots scan behind an airplane as well as ahead of it, are sometimes rough and bully-like on the flight controls, occasionally fly without using any of the airplane's electronic navigation equipment, don't worry about turbulence breaking their airplanes, master airspeed control as a means of making better landings and much more