Understanding the Sky [Paperback]

I am a P3 (intermediate-rated) paraglider pilot. My strong interest in mountain soaring means I am extremely motivated to learn what Understanding The Sky has to offer. I found it to be only a mixed success.

I had studied some meteorology in the past for other purposes, which made this book an easier read. The terminology and some of the concepts are presented so briefly that they would be challenging to grasp if you had no knowledge of them at all when you started the book.

What is great: This book contains a wealth of well-organized information, theoretical and practical, large scale and small scale. It includes such crucial subjects in soaring safety as the formation of rotors under atmospheric waves. (Who would have guessed about those, and they can kill you.) Mr. Pagen has done a lot of flying and has woven his experience and anecdotes into the text throughout. The book is an astonishing compendium.

What is not so great: He uses no footnotes, offers no bibliography, and never names a source. Wind blowing over a mountain has surely been studied by scientists with surface metering equipment, LIDAR guns and other means of collecting data. Id be more comfortable if I knew what references Mr. Pagan had studied to gain his knowledge. There are times when I get the feeling he is making it up based on what seems sensible to him, or what he experienced once or twice in his flying experience. Anecdotes are fine but they should always be presented as such, not mixed in with conclusions drawn more scientifically. My feeling about this may be wrong but without footnotes I have no way to know. I do know that what seems sensible is a poor substitute for actual data when it comes to airflow. Fluid dynamics is incredibly complicated and the subject is full of surprises that go against what seems sensible.

Sometimes he does make clear he is relating something he has personally encountered while soaring and says so. This is good, but he often doesnt say enough. Id like to know how many times he encountered the condition, because in micrometeorology it can be easy to attribute a situation to incorrect causes if you only have one experience to go on. Mr. Pagan occasionally acknowledges this uncertainty, but its not always clear. In one description of air flow over a complicated ridge, he says that the diagram shows what he experienced there, but he doesnt say if it was during a single one hour flight or in flying every day for months. Its also hard to imagine he flew into every rotor shown on the diagram.

What is also not great: Mr. Pagan badly needs a professional editor. His writing is rife with extra words and awkward constructions, and there are numerous errors in the text and figures. He continually uses terms he has not introduced, and while he provides a glossary it is not always adequate to explain them if you have not encountered them before. The pictures are so poorly reproduced that I could only rarely understand what the photo was supposed to illustrate. The challenge of understanding all the information is doubled by the manner of presentation.

At least one diagram appears to have been very precisely photocopied out of another, much older book on the subject, yet again no credit is given. That book is Meteorology for Soaring Pilots, which I recommend without reservation.

The book will be valuable to any pilot. Unfortunately, Mr. Pagens unscientific approach to a scientific subject makes it impossible to know how much of the information can be depended on.

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.

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.

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