Pondering My Aviation Memoir After Three Fatal Plane Crashes
By Shirley M. Phillips
One of the hardest tasks for me in finishing my memoir How Not to Fly an Airplane was choosing a title and cover. Although I suspect this is a challenge for many authors, for me it was compounded by the fact that my debut memoir is about my forty years of flying airplanes and teaching others how to fly. Although I was aware at the time that the last fatal accident of a U.S. airliner occurred in 2009, the fact we had a reprieve did little to alleviate my concerns.
The risks of flying are never far from a pilot’s mind even before they leave the ground. Every pilot is taught how to predict what specific risks they are likely to face on each flight and how to come up with a plan to mitigate those risks—all while knowing that flying can never be risk free. We do things like add fuel if the weather looks bad and turn on landing lights even during the day to make ourselves more visible to the other pilots in the sky. Yet we also know more fuel will not help us if we get too close to a thunderstorm, and that there are limitations on what the human eye can detect from a moving airplane. We pilots know that an airplane or helicopter that is heading directly at us is also the one we will be least likely to see because it doesn’t appear to move in our line of sight.
The title of my memoir was an effort to be descriptive of the material inside without sounding flippant. As I told a college student who recently interviewed me on the book, the essays I wrote are full of ways that I and other pilots made mistakes and what we learned from them. Uneventful flights where nothing goes wrong often provide fewer insights into how to fly safely and make for a boring book.
The essay with the same title as my book came from my learning that sometimes the risks associated with a particular flight are so great that the only safe choice is to stay on the ground. While I lived to learn this lesson, my memoir also contains an essay about my close friend and former student who took too many risks and didn’t live to learn from them. For pilots and flight instructors, each fatal crash can get as personal as handing over your friend’s logbook to the Federal Aviation Administration knowing it contains evidence of his willingness to take risks.
Often when there is an accident like the midair over the Potomac on January 29th, a pilot’s first thought is whether we know any of the pilots involved. This is why I think each accident feels personal to pilots. We know the pilots shared our passion for flying just like many of the victims shared a passion for skating. We don’t like to be reminded that our beloved profession can also bring such pain and sadness to so many people. Before the crash right after takeoff of the Learjet, we like to think about how flying can play such an important role in someone’s life, like taking a sick child home after treatment. We think about how aviation is vital for people who live in remote locations while putting the risk aside for a while. Even before the fatal accident in Alaska, I knew it could happen, and I wanted a book cover that symbolized flight without being too specific. A paper airplane on a background of sky blue became my cover.
After a series of accidents close together, pilots abhor the rush to blame someone for what happened. We know this approach will hinder the meticulous investigation that must be completed. A rush to judgment is inconsistent with the reality that controllers and pilots are humans who are imperfect. It does a disservice to the fact that pilots and controllers are performing many tasks at once and the recognition that their jobs are complex. While I am happy to have the chance to share my memoir about my love of flying and the lessons I have learned and taught, I do so while acknowledging the risks that flying can bring and my own imperfect performance along the way.
—
Biography: Shirley M. Phillips is a former airline pilot and simulator instructor on the Airbus A320. She earned a MA in science writing from Johns Hopkins University after developed a chronic illness and could no longer fly. Her debut memoir, How Not to Fly an Airplane, comes out May 20th from Apprentice House Press. More of her writing can be seen at her website at https://www.shirleymphillips.com.
—
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.
Category: On Writing
Subscribe
If you enjoyed this article, subscribe to receive more just like it.
