What We’re Looking For

We’re looking for first-person accounts of experiences by helicopter pilots. The story should appeal to anyone interested in helicopter flight. It can be funny, exciting, or frightening. It can be a “never again” account of something that happened that you hope you never have to go through again. Or it can be a “best flight of my life” account of a great day, mission, or flight. Or a learning experience you want to share with others.

Think back on all your years of flying, from flight school to your most recent flight. If you could only tell just one story about your experiences as a helicopter pilot, what would it be? That’s the story we want.

Please keep in mind that the book we’re compiling will be available to the public. You should not submit any story that could get you in trouble with an employer, a client, or the authorities. (But you knew that, right?)

Stories should be 1,000 to 5,000 words in length, written in a first-person narrative style — just as you’d tell it to a friend. True stories only, please!

Each story must be accompanied by 1 to 4 photos or other images (for example, maps or diagrams) that are somehow related to the story. You must own the copyright or have written permission from the copyright holder to use any image you send. Please do not send more than 4 images.

The Book

The book, which will be compiled and edited by author Maria Langer, will feature 15 to 20 stories with photos. Maria will choose the stories she thinks are best for the book’s expected audience.

We expect the book to be 200-300 pages long, published in print and as an ebook.

The print version will be in black and white; any color photos will be converted for printing. It will be available to all major booksellers, including Amazon.com and Barnes and Noble. We’re also hoping to get them into fight schools, pilot shops, and aviation museums.

The ebook version will be available on Amazon.com as a Kindle book, on the iBookstore as an iBook, and on BN.com as a NOOK book. It will be in full color. A special edition ebook with video interviews of pilots is also in the planning stages.

We’d like to release the book by the end of May 2012.

How to Submit

Your story must be submitted electronically, as a word processing file. We can read just about any format.

Send the images as individual files — do not embed images in the word processing file.

The best way to submit is to collect the story and photos in a folder on your computer and use the ZIP compression utility to turn it into a single achieved file. Then send that.

You can use the Contact Form on this site to submit. Please, just one submission per person. We want your best story — not all of them.

We will acknowledge receipt of all submissions. We cannot guarantee that we’ll use everything submitted. If we choose your story, we’ll be in touch to get more information about you, as well as necessary permissions.

We’re looking for the best stories submitted by experienced pilots who have something to share. We want readers to understand what flying helicopters is all about by telling them what pilots really face in the course of their work. Help us make a great book by sending your best story.

If you have any questions about this call for submissions, please don’t hesitate to get in touch.

Writers guidelines are currently being prepared; in the meantime, if you have an idea that you think would work in the Maria’s Guides series, please contact us.

Buy from Amazon.com

The imprint was launched this week with the release of its first title: Making Movies: A Guide for Serious Amateurs. This book offers a step-by-step approach to creating quality video productions. Written primarily for video hobbyists, it helps guide readers to make “watchable” video. You can find more information about this book on its support page on the Maria’s Guides Web site.

More titles are planned. Keep checking in to see what’s new.

Problems with the video team began last year when they failed to provide sample video segments that met our quality standards. Although hours of footage were shot for this production, only a small portion is usable. One of the videographers was apparently unfamiliar with his camera’s functions and could not reliably produce sequences that were properly framed or in focus. This same person, who owns the company and acts as video editor, attempted to string various poor quality footage together in an amateurish montage and pass it off as a sales tool. When we realized that the company’s end product was not going to meet our standards, we put a halt to the project and attempted to get a partial refund of the fee we paid up front. The video company has ignored all attempts to get this money back and has not made any efforts to complete the project.

In other words, we were ripped off by a smooth-talking amateur who passed himself off as a professional video producer.

This has been a very expensive learning experience for Flying M Productions. But what bothers us most is that this company is still out there, selling services it so obviously cannot provide.

We’ve shot some new footage for the video and hope to get a suitable production team together to turn it into the video production we’ve envisioned. Thanks for your patience. We hope to present you with an aerial tour of Lake Powell soon.

Keep checking in; we’ll add new video clips and trailers as they become available.

If you’re in Europe, you might want to try the Robbie-Europe site.

Otherwise, we recommend that you contact the publisher, Eye in the Sky Productions, to purchase copies of the book.

The advance orders will go out today. Our staff worked until 10:30 PM last night to package up the Priority Mail orders and again this morning starting at 7 AM to package most of the ground orders. We’ll be dropping the books off at the post office within an hour. Any remaining ground orders will go out on Friday, after the holiday.

From this point on, we will ship all orders as they are received.

Thanks to everyone for their patience as we waited for the books to come. As those of you who ordered books will soon see, they are definitely worth waiting for!