The macho F-16 fighter pilots hanging around Andrews Air Force Base one bright summer day last June found themselves looking skyward with mouths agape. There was a small, 20-foot-long, gleaming white Extra 260 propellor-driven sport plane flitting and zooming through the air like a crazed insect.
Military jet jocks pull off some pretty hot stuff in their F-16s, but nothing like this. The Extra was doing inside snap rolls, outside snap rolls, Cuban eights, loops, tailslides, inverted spins, Hammerheads (a combination of up and down rolls) and a faster version called the Humptybump, and all with lightning fast, whip-cracking precision.
And it wasn’t some real-life version of Tom Cruise’s “Top Gun” movie character at the controls. It was a woman, arguably the very best pilot in the country. Her name is Patty Wagstaff, she has won the national aerobatic championships the last three years and in March that little plane she had been tossing around the skies over suburban Maryland was enshrined in an exhibition at the Smithsonian Institution’s National Air and Space Museum, home of the first Wright Brothers Flyer and Charles Lindbergh’s Spirit of St. Louis.
The diminutive, dark-haired, St. Louis-born Wagstaff took up flying 16 years ago.
Wagstaff, 42, did not come to Andrews AFB last June to show off, as she does every summer at air shows all over the country. She was delivering the Extra into the perpetual care of the Smithsonian, in preparation for ceremonies March 11 in which the plane was installed in the National Air and Space Museum’s Pioneers of Flight gallery, next to the big red Lockheed Vega flown by the fabled Amelia Earhart in the 1930s.
“It’s good company,” said Wagstaff, who counts Earhart among her heroes, though her biggest flying idols are superpilot record-breaker Jacqueline Cochran and whiskey-guzzling Pancho Barnes, of “The Right Stuff” fame.
Rarely does the Smithsonian confer its special immortality on a living, still-active pilot and still-functioning competitive plane.
“We thought she was breaking another barrier for women, and it’s just an exciting, wonderful aircraft,” said Dorothy Cochrane, Smithsonian aeronautics curator.
“The combination of Patty and the plane was too much to resist. When Patty won her second consecutive national championship in 1992, I was interested. When she won her third championship in a row last year, she clearly became the finest aerobatic pilot in the country. She’s the tops, absolutely.”
Of all forms of sport aviation-in terms of pure flying skills-aerobatics is the most demanding.
“You might get some argument about it out at the Reno Air Races,” Cochrane said, “but essentially it’s true. Unlike pilots making endurance or altitude or speed flights, aerobatic pilots don’t just prepare for an event, they have to constantly practice to keep perfect. It’s very, very hard.”
Compounding matters for Wagstaff, who was taught to fly by her lawyer-bush pilot husband, Bob, was that she had to win her three consecutive championships mostly against men, who have dominated the sport.
The Federation Aeronautique Internationale, world governing body for sport aviation, has long divided all world-record flying achievement into male and female categories. The international championships, held every two years for the various aerial sports classifications, including aerobatics, are also broken down into competition by sex.
But for its U.S. activities, the National Aerobatic Association dropped the male-female bar in 1972.
Wagstaff, who first soloed in 1980, began aerobatic lessons in 1983 and entered her first aerobatic contest in 1984. She is preparing for a run at her fourth championship this summer.
“The masculine, feminine thing makes no sense at all, not with airplanes,” Wagstaff said during an interview. “I’ve talked with some of the women who were involved, and they just felt it was ridiculous.
“Because of our system, we were able to change, but Europe is way behind. I’ve talked to European women about it, at the world aerobatic championships. All the men and women fly the same types of planes, fly the same routines, do exactly the same thing, but at the end of the contest, it’s separated into men’s and women’s competition, and men’s and women’s teams.
“I think it’s ridiculous. But the women I talk to, especially the Russian and Eastern bloc women, feel that if there weren’t women’s teams, there wouldn’t be any women competing. In their systems, that’s probably true. They have no women airline pilots and no women military pilots in Russia.
“A couple of years ago, the United States made a proposal to the aeronautic governing body to eliminate men’s and women’s divisions, but the U.S. was the only one who voted for it.
“Most of the resistance came from young women-not just the Eastern bloc women, but the French and English. They just felt they didn’t necessarily want to compete against the men. I don’t really understand it. Maybe they’ve been brainwashed or something.”
When Wagstaff was growing up in the 1950s and 1960s, the daughter of Bob Combs, an Air Force bomber pilot (later an airline captain) and his wife, Patty, the U.S. wasn’t too receptive to female pilots, either, despite the precedents set by Earhart, Cochran, Barnes and others.
Harriet Quimby, an aviation pioneer, celebrity journalist and, in 1912, the first woman to fly the English Channel, became the first licensed woman pilot in the United States just a few short years after the Wright Brothers invented the airplane. But women pilots were still a rarity a generation later.
“When I was a little girl, I wanted to fly,” Wagstaff said. “And I told my parents that. They said, `Women don’t become pilots. It’s just not an option for you.’ So I said OK. I suppose I could have fought it, but I didn’t.”
But attitudes changed in the late ’60s and early ’70s. Wagstaff’s sister, Toni Combs, born nine years later, found it “totally different.” She became a pilot while a teenager and flies for Continental Airlines.
“She had a lot of support and encouragement to start flying when she was 14,” Wagstaff said. “She soloed at 16. In nine years, things had changed that much.”
When her father left the Air Force and began flying for Japan Air Lines and other commercial carriers, then-9-year-old Patty moved to Japan with her family and managed some very unofficial flying time by riding on her father’s lap during flights.
At 19, Wagstaff left Japan to move to California. Not liking the social disorder of the early 1970s-“a strange time, a lot of weird things happening”-she married an Australian and moved to his country, where she remained five years. Then, newly divorced and on her way to try out life in Africa, she stopped off in Alaska, took a temporary job as a development planner, met her future second husband, Bob, and never got to Africa.
Bob Wagstaff, a lawyer who flew his Cessna 185 floatplane all over the Alaskan wilds, began teaching her to fly in 1978. With his help and that of a professional instructor, she soloed after about 20 hours, and, like all pilots, recalls that first time well:
“You’re up there thinking, `Wow, this is it. This is it. Don’t mess up. You’ve got to handle this. You can do it.’ “
By 1983, she had become a flight instructor, but a long-standing fascination with aerobatics led her to sign up for lessons.
“My big fear wasn’t that I wouldn’t like it or that I wouldn’t do well, but that, for some reason, it might not agree with me. I was really afraid of that. I had never gotten sick in an airplane, but what happens if I get sick?”
She went up, apprehensive, and came down ecstatic.
“It was fabulous. I just loved it. I was a little light-headed when I came down, but I didn’t get sick.”
Continuing her lessons, she entered her first contest in 1984 at Fond du Lac, Wis., and came in 25th out of 27.
She and Bob Wagstaff got married that day.
“We rushed off to the court house and came back so we’d see the rest of the flying. I think our honeymoon was in the Dartmoor Motel.”
From then on, it was mostly a matter of hard work and arduous, endless practice.
Except for occasionally taxiing into sawhorses and such, she never has had an accident. But “I have scared myself,” she said.
In 1985, she was flying in Tennessee, practicing flat spins in an aerobatic plane she and her husband had bought. She started one spin at 6,000 feet, but, using traditional recovery methods, couldn’t get out of it. The plane kept spinning around and around, down and down.
Then she recalled a lesson she’d taken once in emergency spin recovery.
“It was like I could hear the guy’s voice right behind me. `Hands off stick. Opposite rudder. You look straight down to see which way the plane’s going, and give it full opposite rudder.’ And it actually came out. It worked, but it scared me so bad. I think I was finally down to about 1,000 feet before I pulled out.”
That same year she competed in the U.S. nationals and has every year since, beating out two male former champions in 1991 to become the first woman to win the national title.
Also in 1985 she had qualified for the U.S. aerobatic team competing in the world championships. In the last world contest two years ago, she came in ninth overall and second in the women’s competition.
Wagstaff said her husband isn’t envious of her prowess and success, though he introduced her to flying.
“He has his own interests in aviation. He really isn’t that big on aerobatics. My husband’s an excellent seaplane pilot, and he loves instrument flying. He’s got ratings in various aircraft. He’s president of the U.S. Aerobatic Foundation and an aerobatics judge. He’s real involved in it with me without being competitive. I think it would be really difficult to have both of us compete.”
In the weeks leading up to a contest, she’ll fly three exhausting practice sessions every day. Between contests, mostly during the summer, she demonstrates her prowess for pay at air shows. Last year she was away from home for three months.
The Wagstaffs divide their time between Dillingham, Alaska, and Tucson. They have no children of their own, but he has three from a previous marriage, one at college and 16-year-old twins.
The Wagstaffs own four airplanes, including a 1949 Piper Cub with clipped-off wings for aerobatics performance.
When not flying, she likes hiking, bicycling, photography and ballet.
“I love dancing, but I don’t have much time for it anymore. Mostly it’s work.”
Wagstaff doesn’t like to hear what she does called “stunt flying.”
“Stunts are something you do for a movie,” she said. “What I do is precision aerobatic flying … because it’s practiced and planned and rehearsed and something you do every day. A stunt would be something like flying under a bridge. I do that too.”
Wagstaff does occasional movie work, and flew a plane in Mel Gibson’s “Forever Young.” She’s hoping to get a job flying the jump plane in a Hollywood flick about skydiving in Florida.
She also has made a video of her precision aerobatic flying.
“I’m learning,” she said. “I think I’m getting better and better at what I do.”
