Author and pilot Shirley Phillips will be at the Aviation Museum of New Hampshire on Nov. 13 to present her newly-published memoir, "How Not to Fly an Airplane." Courtesy photo/Aviation Museum of New Hampshire

LONDONDERRY – What would you do if you were mid-air and suddenly realized you were flying a plane without engine oil?

Pilot Shirley Phillips, author of “How Not to Fly an Airplane,” experienced that very situation when she was a 23-year-old flight instructor, with passengers on board and smoke filling the cockpit as the engine began to shake apart.

Learn how she navigated her way through that adventure and many others at a book-signing and presentation on Nov. 13 at 7 p.m. at the Aviation Museum of New Hampshire, 27 Navigator Rd. in Londonderry. Admission is $10 per person and museum members are free.

A Nashua resident, Phillips knew she wanted to be a pilot at age 14 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 set her on an unexpected path from the moment she left the ground.

“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.

The book also details finding a sense of identity as a twin, becoming the first pregnant pilot at an airline as well as losing a friend and former student in an infamous plane crash.

Told through Phillips’ wide-ranging experience in more than four decades of flying in frank and often humorous writing, “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.

Copies of the book will be available after the presentation for $20.99.

Phillips’ writing has been published in The Atlantic, Dr. T.J. Eckleburg Review, RavensPerch and Chicken Soup for the Soul: Lessons Learned from My Cat.