If your gunners are telling you that you can't hold your ship steady, it's not your fault. Don't get too worked up about negative feedback from your gunners, just keep encouraging them.

You know how you fly best, don't go out of your comfort zone for your gunners. Ever. The amount of times I've done it and lost a ship... I apologise to the gunners for making them lose their suits, but will they ever experience as much loss as me? No.

As for dropping people off, landing near a hackable objective works most of the time, since passengers can't see where they are but if you touch down on the ground it's fairly obvious. Occasionally you get the stubborn blueberry who won't get out and instead decides to shoot the enemy mCRU with a missile turret (destroying it even with XT-1s would require buckets of popcorn), lighting us up for miles and alerting every cranberry and his dog to our presence. Don't be as stubborn as him and sit there until he gets out. Give it 5 seconds MAX after you land, then gtfo.

When being fired at by forge guns, the general consensus among pilots is to 'fly erratically'. This certainly works, but you CAN have some semblance of control over your ship. Make sure you're flying back towards your redline, even if you're zooming around, weave like you're trying to dodge sniper bullets on the ground, but always have a direction in mind. And mind your surroundings; I've smashed into the MCC as I was retreating backwards from a forge gunner (trying to see where he was firing from) so many times... and it's totally my fault.

If you can get a good forge gunner on top of your dropship... you're good to go.

At the beginning of matches, if the map looks like it has lots of installations, go hack or destroy some first. This is a big problem, though, because the start of a battle is when people will fill your dropship. Once the uplinks are down, you will be unneeded unless you have an mCRU, but even then uplinks take preference because of the ridiculous issue where we can't spawn into mCRUs if we're still bleeding out.

Afterburners. All dropships except maybe Logistics need them.

Use that flight ceiling. I fly really low because I'm used to that ****** flight ceiling from Chromosome, but I'm trying to keep reminding myself that I have all that height nowadays. Get up high, spiral down towards the point you want to drop your troops at.

Learn the boundaries of the aerial redline. In a dropship, redline is pushed back a fair bit for some maps. Learn that, and use that extra airspace where no ground units can access to hide from AV.

The recall function. Some may call you a coward but tankers do it too. And if tankers do it, god knows dropship pilots should be abusing the crap out of it. If AV is too heavy, recall.

Be prepared for losses and pain. BSOTT has ISK, you will be reimbursed to some extent, but don't rely on the corporation wallet. You learn best from your losses when you're forced to mull over how you lost your dropship for the next 5 games when you're grinding the ISK back up.