Product Description

John P. Nghiwete's The In-Flight Diversion Handbook is a thorough, well-written, and truly unique guide that can help any pilot learn how to navigate their aircraft using the tried-and-tested methods and techniques that have been proven highly effective by the pilots of yesteryear, and which can be a useful back-up to the high-tech gadgets that modern-day pilots are increasingly taking for granted.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #1851537 in Books
• Published on: 2007-03-14
• Released on: 2007-03-14
• Original language: English
• Binding: Paperback
• 56 pages

About the Author
John P. Nghiwete is an airline pilot, instructor and author. He began his training as a pilot even as a teenager; he flies passenger jets for a major airline in Southern Africa. His inspiration as an author is to write about subjects that he himself, as an experienced pilot, would also like to read about.

Customer Reviews

In flight diversion review
This product underpins some of the more interesting elements of aviation and mathematically calculating pertaining to flight. However, it neglects to share a practical insight into such applications and is very elusive when it comes to sharing a realistic use of these methods mid-flight whilst under the real world pressure. Therefore, I would think the author has failed to deliver anything more interesting than a classroom trigonometry lesson with regard to flying and dead reckoning navigation. Perhaps a serious pilot out there will some day quit the nonsense and write up what we all know any respectable instruction is clearly utilising during in flight-diversions.
It is simply not practicable to be drawing the triangle of velocities inside the working confines of cessna 150, and it would make little sense not to use the readily available exponent of a calculator or whizz wheel slide rule whilst on the ground. Thus the story goes with this thin manuel.
It would be far more helpful and intriguing to be drawing up a manuel displaying examples of in flight mental calculations eg wind 220/40 can you mentally calculate the wind correction angles for upwind, crosswind, downwind, base and final. Or can you mentally calculate Time, Speed and distance requirements etc etc?
To be fair the book does delve into these realms, but only at a fleeting glance. There is little there that one could not find in many other publications, with far more depth in dealing with the subject matter, than is displayed here.

Simple and easy to read
Ignore the haters, this is the only book on the market that teaches mental navigation skills...the presentation is not always the best, but the message comes through.

Take it or leave it: Leave It
You're flying directly toward a storm and you're not rated or trained to fly IFR so the question becomes what to do now? Diversion! The pertinent question is, where to and how? Is there an airport nearby or is a 180-degree turn back to home feasible?

John P. Nghiwete's book attempts a valiant effort to help the pilot in quandary answer the question with ease and efficiency. Unfortunately for the South African airline pilot, the book's somewhat scattered approach does more harm than good.

The production value of the book itself leaves something to be desired. It feels like it was printed on an early laser jet printer from a Word 95 document, definitely an amateurish effort. Be that as it may, and heeding the injunction not to judge a book by its cover, the story gets no better within.

There is no discernible structure to this work. As I read the scant 44-page document, I got the feeling there wasn't much thought put to describing how information and instruction would flow in a logical manner from the moment the pilot decides to actually divert, the next steps or action items there following and the data required to either know or calculate and then the calculation process itself.

Nghiwete didn't seem to have put himself in the shoes of his prospective audience and instead has indulged himself in an information-dumping exercise that is scattered and inchoate leading, if not to outright bewilderment, then at least to confusion.

He starts well enough, by promising ease of use, etc. and then describes the nature of a diversion which leads very quickly to the mathematical topic of a 1-in-60 triangle and the 1-degree angle so subtended. Right on the heels of this, he shows several 60-degree shapes (although he states they can be drawn with angles other than 60-degrees?) that purport to show different diversion strategies. It wasn't until the second reading that I understood him to show these examples as diversions around a thunderstorm. I had originally wondered why these were used and what they had to do with the 1-in-60 concept.

Further on, he explains the idea behind track errors and closing angles without the need to work on calculating the effect of wind on a diversionary operation. Frankly, what he describes doesn't show that whatsoever; he simply does not explain why what he's describing obviates the need for a wind calculation. I would come to realize that the author's lack of explanation is characteristic of this book. He simply proclaims a fact and expects instant understanding.

To his credit, he undertakes another attempt at discussing a `big picture' overview of the process but that swiftly devolves into disparate treatises on different topics. An attempt at making an acronym out of the first letters of each of the steps he recommends is laughable and nonsensical (The Hot Gun Can Aviate Sail Dive Think).

Page 7 finds Nghiwete discussing the effect of wind on heading and actually suggests the use of a GPS or INS unit, which he says will help "even the smallest aircraft [to] instantly calculate the wind velocity acting on it." I'm not sure if Mr. Nghiwete understands that if the prospective reader and pilot happens to have a GPS unit, there would really be no need to be performing any diversion calculations as simply pressing a button to find the nearest airport and then pressing the "Direct To" button would instantly do all the work.

The different topics follow in rapid succession, but again, Mr. Nghiwete does not weave a consistent tapestry: why is it important to know or figure out the ground speed? Why am I calculating the angle of wind incidence on my aircraft? How does it all relate, one to the other? The other work on drawing out complex geometrical diagrams to calculate the various Points of No Returns, Points of No Alternates, etc., etc., are next-to-useless for the modern pilot who simply does not have the space, much less the time, to be making these drafting-style drawings.

In summary, it's an OK work. I don't dislike it as it has some useful information, but there are way better books on diversion planning on the market that are better-produced and better-written. Try again, Mr. Nghiwete or might I suggest you divert to another field of endeavor? Certainly anything other than writing books.