Unfriendly Skies is a candid account of the aviation business in the late 80s by a senior pilot, with some of the rough edges smoothed over by a professional writer. When the anecdotes work, they really work, with hair-raising tales of threading the needle through tornadoes in the midwest, coming into small airports hot and steep, and the snap-second judgement that stand between life and death for everybody on the plane. The authors keep it quick and avoid getting bogged down in technical jargon.

Where it doesn't quite work is in the big picture case about deregulation as the worst thing that happened to airlines. Captain X decries the end of a system that made him, with tight-knit crews, pretty blondes, and homogenized airline cultures, but the argument that deregulation was literally killing everything doesn't quite stick, aside from change bad.

Be aware that there are some hilarious outdated Boomerism about how women and non-military pilots will never make it. And of course, the book itself is more than 25 years old at this point, so everything is done differently. But one ultimate test is in the pudding, and when Captain X discusses a future of technological accidents rather than pilot error (See Air France 447), and decreasing passenger comforts with the commoditization of air travel, he's spot on. The only thing he didn't predict is 9/11. If you can take the anecdotes with a grain of salt and handle the attitude, this is a fun book.