Rod Machado's Private Pilot Handbook: The Ultimate Private Pilot Book Paperback – January 1, 1997

Was exactly as described and expected.

This is by far the best review book out there for those studying for their private pilot's license. Rod Machado has a real talent on making the subject material interesting and easy to understand. Coupled with his private pilot workbook, these books have been a life saver for me! I was having a difficult time reading the private pilot manuals given to us for ground school, but Rod's books make the reading enjoyable. In fact, I am reading this book now more when I study rather than the book that was given to us for class. Rod's sense of humor comes through quite a bit in the chapters, but the way the material is presented makes it easy to understand and comprehend, especially some of the more difficult aviation subjects. And the workbook that goes along with this book is a great way to study for exams (the workbook has multiple choice questions that refer back to specific page numbers/paragraphs in the book to help clarify questions you might not understand). I highly recommend this book to anyone who is working on attaining their private pilot's license. If not used as a primary book to study from, it is a great asset to have as a reference to help clarify difficult subject matter or to help lighten things up a bit while you are studying.

Bought this after an airline pilot recommend it to me. I wish I had purchase sooner but got it a few weeks before my checkride and thought it was great! He keeps it simple and related topics to things that will help you remember! He does have soem humor throughout that I can see where other reviews mentioned they didn’t like it, but I had no issues with it! Definitely worth the money if yo I are working on your Ppl!

I now have my private pilot's license thanks, as far as ground school is concerned, to this book.I had excellent instructors who were willing to answer "ground school" questions in the course of my practical flying lessons, but 95% of my preparation for the "academic" side of the tests, written and practical, was taken care of by careful reading of this excellent text.The material is well organized.It is clear, and the writing style engaging. The knowledge you have to master will always be considerable, but with this book you can find all you need, and the reading is not tedious. The dull work is leavened by reasonable levels of humor.There's a good index.I did use one other book in my preparation: The Jeppeson written test prep book which is about 800 FAA questions, along with the right answers and analysis of why they are right. But that was just to prepare for the test, in a tactical sense. The Machado book was where I learned the material upon which I would be tested. Apart from those two books, I did little reading, and I had no "formal" ground school. "Homeschooled", you might say.

It never ceases to amaze me how much has been written about aviation and how confusing it can be to the initial student. I read this book cover to cover when learning to fly. I also read many others but found this to be the most complete and certainly the most readable. Moving on though my flight ratings I found myself using it often as a resource as we tend to forget such things as how many hectopescals are standard and that can be embarrasing when doing an ATP oral and not being able to explain the end of a METAR. I have had my students use it thought the years and the feedback is uniformly highly favorable. I would encourage all to read it and to make sure your instructor knows you are so you can read a chapter ahead before each flight (i.e. VOR Naviagation) before you go intercepting VOR radials. Machado is very good and a legend in flight instruction. This book should be THE book for all student pilots.

As someone completely new to aviation, there is so much jargon and unfamiliar equipment and so many acronyms and that the potential for looking stupid seems high. I didn't know what a pitot tube is, and I appreciate the fact that Rod Machado doesn't assume that the reader knows that or even that they know how to pronounce it. He says, "that' pee-toe, not pilot" which is helpful. If you've hung around airports for the past ten years, you probably already knew how to pronounce it, but I didn't. This excellent attention to detail is this books strength. The author gives not one, but two photographs of pitot tube and explains that they are usually found under the left wing. As another example, I had read elsewhere that you need to test your fuel for water, but a single glance at the two photographs he included turned the concept from some vague ethereal haze in the back of my mind to a simple, "Okay. I get it." You can see this here on Amazon by clicking the "Look inside this book" link under the photograph of the book, then go forward a couple of pages to page A3. Figure 7 at the bottom of the page has the caption: "Under the wing is a fuel tank sump drain. Since airplane engines don't seem to run very well on impurities, the sumps should be drained before every flight and after every fueling." Figure 8 next to it shows someone checking for impurities witha clear plastic fuel strainer. Nothing beats seeing it.What I don't like about this book (and the reason I only gave it four stars) are the dumb jokes. When I read about the silly humor in another review I thought, "Lighten up, how bad can it really be?" Bad. Worse than you think. In fact, I think it detracts from an otherwise excellent book. What exactly does the author mean in the example above when he says, "Since airplane engines don't seem to run very well on impurities..."? Apparently, it's a joke (yuk, yuk). Besides from being distracting, it seems like what we get is a joke instead of information: what kind of impurities are we talking about here? Water? Or something else? These jokes are peppered throughout the text and they very quickly become tedious. I wish they were in the margin or in a different font so that I could ignore them. On page A5 the author talks about strobe lights on planes. One sentence starts, "This is necessary because..." I thought to myself, this must be an important point I'd better remember it. Disappointingly, the sentence ends with "...because screaming out the window does not work." If these silly jokes were in a special font I could have more easily skipped over them and they would have been less irritating.This is a large (as big as a medium size phone book), thorough and very well illustrated book and I'm glad I bought it.