Page 4 - Volume 15 Number 2
P. 4

editor’sbriefing
The Girl With A Big Dream
In the late 1950s, a young girl dared to do what no other female in her small Missouri
town had ever done. She dreamed of learning to fly. When she was 15, she begged her father to allow her to take a ride in an airplane, a Cessna 170 that a man kept on a grass strip. Despite the protests of her mother, she paid the man a penny per pound and climbed
aboard. That short flight, low and slow over the countryside, sealed the deal. Somehow, she resolved, she would learn to do this.
After graduating from high school – valedictorian no less – she secured a job at a local bank as a loan clerk and secretly began saving her money for flying lessons. She told no one at work of her plans, as they would have thought she was eccentric at best, or just plain crazy.
Only one person was in on the scheme: her father. An aviation buff himself, he encouraged her dream. Finally, the 19-year-old girl gathered her nerve and drove to the airport, taking along her father for moral support.
Before she knew it, she was standing on the brakes of an Aeronca Champ while her new flight instructor propped the
plane. Eight flight hours later, she soloed. Unfortunately, the Champ’s engine gave out, and she was without an airplane. Gathering her nerve once again, she marched into her boss’ office at the bank and asked him for a $2,000 loan to buy an airplane. What she didn’t know was that he was a World War II pilot. He was ecstatic with her plan and agreed to loan the money. She bought a Piper PA-12 Super Cruiser.
Six months after her first solo, she flew the tiny Piper 100 miles to Springfield, Mo., to take her check ride from the FAA. As she taxied in after her check ride, the examiner leaned forward and said, “How does it feel to be a private pilot?”
Upon landing back at her home field, the new pilot spotted her father standing at the edge of the turf runway, waiting for her. They celebrated her accomplishment by taking him up as her first passenger.
That day started a lifelong romance with aviation that would last 47 accident-free years. The girl grew up, married, and had a daughter and a son. She also kept flying, owning a 1964 Cessna 172, and a new 1967 Cessna 172, which she picked up from the Cessna Pawnee factory in Wichita. In 1975, she would buy her third Cessna 172, a new Skyhawk II with bright orange-and-brown paint. This airplane, beloved and babied by its owner, would eventually serve to teach her daughter to fly.
In 2010, after a protracted battle to regain her medical after heart surgery, the girl with a big dream was
forced to hang up her wings.
But the story isn’t over, it’s just getting started. This pilot’s daughter has a 15-year- old girl with a big dream. She not only envisions herself a pilot like her mom and grandmother, she dreams of one day flying in space. So that pretty little Cessna, so cherished by its first and only owner, is now being loved by a new generation of women. It sits waiting patiently to teach the girl to fly, just as it did her mother before her.
And you can bet when the girl taxis in from her check ride, her grandmother will be waiting at the fence, ready to be her first passenger.
Dianne White Editor
Dianne White’s mentor and mother Pat. This photo was taken in late December just prior to Dianne flying Pat’s beloved Cessna from southern Missouri to its new home in Wichita.
2
2 •
• ­T
NE FEBRUARY 2011
TW
W
IN
& TU
UR
RB
BI
I
N




































































   2   3   4   5   6