How Not to Fly and Airplane
Shirley M. Phillips knew she wanted to be a pilot when she was fourteen years old, thanks to an introductory flight in a Cessna that her father gave her and her twin sister at their local airport. Living in a small New England town where no one in her family had aviation experience, and at a time when only two percent of professional pilots were female, her decision to pursue aviation from the moment she left the ground set her on an unexpected path.
How Not to Fly an Airplane is about learning to fly before you are old enough to drive a car, and teaching others when you are nearly always mistaken for being the pilot’s girlfriend, wife, or daughter. It’s about the many mistakes you can make in an airplane, and what it’s like to solve them, thousands of feet in the air or just a few feet above the trees. It’s about finding a sense of identity as a twin, becoming the first pregnant pilot at an airline, and losing a friend and former student in an infamous plane crash.
What happens when a student pilot freezes on the flight controls just a few hundred feet in the air? How do you deal with a flight instructor who takes out a runway light during a botched landing and then lets go of the stick? What’s it like to have an engine failure when your airplane only has one engine? Told through Phillips’s wide-ranging experience in over four decades of flying, How Not to Fly an Airplane is a memoir for anyone who has ever wondered what it’s like to fly, and inspiration for anyone who has felt compelled to do something nobody thought they could do.
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About the Author
Shirley M. Phillips fell in love with airplanes at the age of fourteen when her father bought her a ride at her local airport. Six years later she taught her father how to fly when she became a flight instructor. She has worked for two airlines and the biggest airplane she has flown is the Airbus A320. Her career as a pilot was cut short when she became sick with a chronic illness, but she stayed active in aviation as a professor of aeronautical sciences. Her first publication was in AOPA Pilot where she wrote about one of her two engine failures before the age of 26. When she is not writing she likes to knit and one day hopes to make two mittens that are the same size.
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