Book Review: How to Land an A330 Airbus by James May
I recently finished another Audible audio book. It was How to Land an A330 Airbus: And Other Vital Skills of the Modern Man by James May.
I need to start by saying that I am a really, really big fan of James May. After watching his Toy Stories series, I decided that when I grow up, I want to be James May. It was brilliant, inventive, and just a bunch of fun.
That made me really look forward to this book.
Content
I didn’t know what to expect with this book. Overall, I really like James’ sense of humour (humor for my US readers). While listening to this book though, I felt that it was starting to age, and while many of the topics he mentioned were familiar to me from my childhood, I could imagine that others (particularly younger others) might just struggle a bit. So I ended up finding it a mix between very funny, and still underwhelming.
The book is a look into a number of topics, with a strangely deep discussion in parts. And I enjoyed that. It included the following topics and others that I might have forgotten at this point:
- How to land an Airbus A330
- How to escape from a Butlin’s holiday camp by tunneling
- How to drive a Peppercorn Class A1 Pacific Locomotive Tornado
- How to invade and occupy the Isle of Wight
- How to play Beethoven’s Moonlight Sonata on the piano
- How to deliver twins
- How to defuse an unexploded German WW II bomb in your backyard
along with an interesting but bizarre discussion about how to prepare and eat people who didn’t survive after a plane crash in the wilderness. Apparently, that’s not cannibalism as it wasn’t intended to happen.
Summary
This is one for James’ true fans, and those who love his dry sense of wit and his bizarre interest in relatively useless detail.
Greg’s rating?
6 out of 10
2025-03-27