The driving rain and snow was so heavy Thursday morning that some residents who lived near the Cheyenne, Wyo., airport could not see out their windows. But to 7-year-old Jessica Dubroff, buckled into a red booster seat that allowed her to see out of the cockpit of the small plane she was piloting across America, the downpour was an exhilaration.
“Do you hear the rain?” the excited 7-year-old girl asked her mother in a pre-takeoff telephone call from the runway. “Do you hear the rain?”
There was no hint of fear in the young girl’s voice. “Scared was not in her vocabulary,” Jessica’s mother, Lisa Blair Hathaway, had told an interviewer last week, as the girl was preparing to set off in a bid to become the youngest pilot to fly across the country.
The homespun, new age philosophy of life that Hathaway taught her children stressed “being” rather than thinking and feeling. And anyway, the curious and engaging child who built furniture with carpentry tools, rode horses and played three musical instruments was not the type to hesitate in the face of a challenge.
So the single-engine Cessna 177B, with 4-feet-2 Jessica, her father, Lloyd Dubroff, and flight instructor Joe Reid aboard, trundled down the slippery runway and struggled to get aloft. It rose a few hundred feet and then suddenly nosed into a north Cheyenne driveway.
All three perished in the crash Thursday morning. Rescue teams found them still strapped inside their seats, but it was not immediately determined who was at the controls when the crash occurred.
“Something was off, clearly,” Hathaway said. “Jessica either mis-chose or maybe it was lightning.”
Even though her daughter and ex-husband were killed in the crash, Hathaway did not waver from her belief that children should be encouraged to have such adventures.
“Clearly I would want all my children to die in a state of joy. I mean, what more could I ask for? I would prefer it was not at age 7 but, God, she went with her joy and her passion, and her life was in her hands,” an emotional Hathaway said in Falmouth, Mass., where the plane was supposed to land on Friday.
Jessica took off on an eight-day, 7,000-mile journey Wednesday from a small airport near her home here in rural Pescadero to a chorus of cheers from family, friends and supporters. Cheyenne had been the first overnight stop, with a Ft. Wayne, Ind., stopover scheduled for Thursday.
An avid pupil since she took her first flight in a plane on her 6th birthday, Jessica was aiming to best previous unofficial cross-country flight records set by 8- and 9-year-olds. But that was not her primary mission, she told a reporter from the San Jose Mercury News last week.
“I fly for joy,” Jessica said. “I just enjoy being up in the air, floating. You can see the clouds and look down at all the cars and trucks and buildings.”
After the crash, another, harsher chorus of voices rose across the country as flight instructors and aviation experts questioned the propriety of allowing a 7-year-old to attempt such a grueling cross-country journey.
“I feel it was a foolish, exploitative stunt, and I don’t think it should be encouraged,” Don Peters of the Aviation Safety Institute told CNN. “It’s one thing to fly around a small airport on a calm, sunny day, but quite another thing to make an extended flight across country including mountains and weather. You can’t expect a young child to do that.”
Joe Gore, a retired flight instructor and co-owner of the cafe at Jessica’s home airport in Half Moon Bay, Calif., was one of several of Jessica’s acquaintances who said that despite the girl’s aptitude, she shouldn’t have been attempting a cross-country flight.
“I’ve got kids, and they’ve gone up with me on the plane and taken the controls,” he said. “But to go cross-country in the springtime is tough enough for professionals, let alone amateurs.”
Others questioned whether Jessica’s parents had in some way pressured her into the attempt, however inadvertently. Her father, a corporate consultant who only a year ago had fretted that Jessica was too young to take up riding ponies, had suggested the cross-country flight as an ideal educational experience.
“From what I gather, Mommy and Daddy were pushing her into this, but she went along with the program,” said Steve Chial, who has worked as an attendant at the Half Moon Bay Airport for 25 years.
Some who knew the girl sharply disputed that idea.
“Her parents didn’t push Jessica into anything,” said Chris Dutsch, who lives next door to the family. “Jessica was a very adventuresome, bright child.”
“There was no pressure to do anything,” echoed Kelly McKnight, who owns the horse farm where Jessica learned to ride. “She got to set her own goals and pursue her own dreams.”
In Washington, Federal Aviation Administration chief David Hinson dispatched investigators to the crash site and called for a review of regulations that permit non-pilots to manipulate flight controls during regular flights.
FAA regulations require that individuals must be at least 16 years old to have a pilot’s license. Non-pilots, “whether 7 years old or 97 years old,” may operate the controls “only when it is safe to do so” with a licensed pilot in charge at all times, Hinson said.
Officially, Jessica was not the pilot of the four-seat airplane. Next to her at the controls was her instructor, Reid, who owned the plane, while her father was supposed to be sitting behind her in a passenger seat.
But the understanding when the three took off on Wednesday was that Reid would take the controls only in an emergency and during difficult stretches over mountain ranges.
Tom Johnson, a 15-year pilot, said he saw the plane shortly after takeoff and it appeared the pilot was trying to return to the Cheyenne airport. “It stalled over my building, winged over and went straight into the ground like a dart,” he said.
Jessica was a remarkable child, raised by non-traditional parents who schooled her and her two siblings at home and encouraged the girl to fly as a “real life” way to learn math, weather forecasting, geography and physics.
