Shirley M. Phillips
Shirley M. Phillips
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Show notes
Shirley M. Phillips is a trailblazing female pilot whose career spans over 40 years in aviation — from flight instructor to first pregnant airline pilot at her company. In this pilot interview, she shares unforgettable aviation memoir stories from the cockpit, including instructing state troopers in tiny Cessnas, regaining control from a student pilot who froze on the controls, and discovering one of her students was headed to a murder trial.
Her new book, How Not to Fly an Airplane, is a must-read aviation memoir for anyone interested in women in aviation, pilot life stories, or the behind-the-scenes reality of becoming a professional pilot. We also discuss her unique publishing journey with Apprentice House Press, a small press run by writing and publishing students at Loyola University Maryland — a path that aspiring indie authors and memoir writers will find inspiring.
Buy the book: How Not to Fly an Airplane
Check out her Moth recording on her website: ShirleyMPhillips.com
The Blurb:
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.
