How to Not Fly an Airplane: A Female Pilot’s Journey 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 to Not 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.
