Articles from Flight Training News 2011/12

This book is based on the aviation articles which Helen wrote for the magazine Flight Training News during the years 2011 to 2012. It begins with an article from Helen’s early days of learning to fly, My Learning-to-Fly Nightmare, which should provide encouragement for anyone who is struggling with the PPL course. The next three articles are about topics of general interest to private pilots. Then come a group of helicopter related articles, but these should still provide food for thought for anyone interested in any type of flying. The last chapter answers the thought provoking issue, Why People Give up Flying. Altogether there are over 22,000 words of flying related information.  If you enjoyed the earlier books, you should like this one too!

Collected Articles on the Life and Work of a Helicopter Pilot

Helen for many years combined working as a helicopter flight instructor with writing about various aspects of rotary aviation for a number of magazines. This latest book is a collection of seven very different articles which could be particularly useful and interesting to those wanting to know about helicopter pilot careers.
The first two articles discuss the qualifications and experience needed to become a commercial helicopter pilot and then a flying instructor. After that come Helen’s experiences of the different jobs available to helicopter pilots, generally obtained from meeting people who did that work. Thus the next two articles are about different aspects of the worthwhile work of air ambulance pilots. Then come two further articles about the work of the Metropolitan Police Air Support Unit. Finally we have some details of the less well known jobs of those pilots who patrol and monitor the gas pipelines throughout the UK.

New Book of Interest to Both Aviators and Travellers

Helen has done a lot of flying over the years, both by aeroplane and helicopter, for she had licences to fly both for a number of years. Most of it was during the time before she settled down and became a helicopter instructor, and it was done partly – though not exclusively – to gain the flying experience needed for that career. Some of it has been in foreign countries, and much of it has been very exciting by all usual standards. Many of these adventures have been published in the past – in flying magazines, the British Women Pilot’s Association newsletter, and various other publications. And it seemed like a good idea to put them all together in book form – and so the idea for My Foreign Flying Adventures began to take shape.

How Helen Became a Helicopter Instructor

About ten years ago, Helen arranged to do a five week intensive flying course to become a helicopter flying instructor. It was all arranged in rather a hurry – the instructor had another student and was ready to start now; could she join that course? Helicopter instructor courses are few and far between, so she agreed, but it wasn’t easy for her. She barely had the required flying experience, and she needed to make hurried domestic arrangements, then drive 200 miles to the airfield where the course would be held to arrange accommodation etc. But she was keen to start, and she also offered to write a regular diary about the course on the forums of a well known aviation website. She did this, keeping it up until the end of the course.

The diary became amazingly popular. Readers found that it provided not only useful details about how a rotary flying instructor course worked, but also fascinating insights into Helen’s life. She was completely honest when writing, and when she was finding things hard, she told her diary….and her ever increasing numbers of readers. This was the case right up to the somewhat unexpected conclusion.

Collected Articles From Flight Training News, 2006-2011, Vol I

In 2006 Helen started writing a regular column in the monthly publication Flight Training News. She contributed informative but lighthearted articles on all aspects of flying, for the most part drawing on her own experience, and almost invariably peppered with useful anecdotes from her own flying. To date she has written over 50 of these articles, and various people have commented on how useful they have been, and also remarked that they would make an excellent book.

Hence the idea for this publication – the first of a series of four. This first one collects together Helen’s fairly introductory articles on learning to fly both aeroplanes and helicopters, aimed at the beginner and those undertaking the Private Pilot’s Licence course. Helen starts by asking the all-important question: Can Anyone Learn to Fly - and she concludes that they can. The next few chapters give useful advice on those all-important price-related issues, plus finding the right airfield, flying school, and instructor. We then move on to some of the human issues related to aviation training, such as confidence problems and how to learn from one’s mistakes. The later sections talk about the important milestone of ‘going solo’, and finally, how to cope with test nerves when you get to that crucial final flight test.