Shirley M Phillips

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. She was on the flight test team for the development of an updated collision avoidance system called ACAS X. Her first publication was in AOPA Pilot where she wrote about one of two engine failures she experienced before the age of 26. She was the first pregnant pilot at her airline, and one of the youngest pilots in the country to be designated by the FAA to issue pilot certificates. She began writing her debut memoir, How Not to Fly an Airplane, from a hospital bed and rewrote many of the essays in the book while earning her MA in science writing from Johns Hopkins University. She is currently working on a book about her interactions with the medical profession as a patient and as the mother of a daughter with a rare genetic disorder. When she is not writing she likes to knit and crochet and one day hopes to make two mittens that are the same size.