Learning to Fly Aeroplanes and Helicopters

Helen Krasner has been flying for many years, and holds a Commercial Helicopter Pilot's Licence and Instructor's Rating. She also has a Private Pilot’s Licence for Aeroplanes, and well over 1000 hours flying time in total. Until recently she worked as a freelance helicopter instructor, flying mainly R22s and R44s.
Helen writes about helicopters and other aviation-related subjects for a number of publications, and she is also the Newsletter Editor for the BWPA (British Women Pilots’ Association). She was nominated for one of the Aerospace Journalist of the Year Awards in 2004, for an article about Flying Helicopters in Russia. She has published a book about helicopter flying – The Helicopter Pilot’s Companion (Crowood Press 2008), and a second book, on learning to fly helicopters, is due out in July 2011. Helen has also written and published a book about a five thousand mile walk around Britain which she undertook some years ago (Midges, Maps, and Muesli).
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 nearly 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. That is how this book came about...

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.

Helen hopes that you will enjoy reading these articles as much as she enjoyed writing them. She would like you to feel free to email her at the address above with any comments. She apologises in advance for any repetition, and also for the large number of apparent gaps, should anyone expect this book to follow the whole Private Pilot’s Licence course. It should be remembered that this is a collection of articles, written at different times during the last few years, so such things are inevitable. It should definitely not be used to replace a standard textbook and a flying instructor’s briefings, but will hopefully provided additional useful and interesting information; that is all.