As the plane took off, Jessica’s brother, Joshua, 9, was talking to his dad on a cell phone from Falmouth, Mass. Later he recalled his father’s last words to him: “I’ll talk to you again. See you in Falmouth.” He didn’t. In a minute’s time, the single-engine Cessna 177B, flying over the weight limit, ascended just 400 feet, went into what Cheyenne airport manager Jerry Olson called a “classic stall” and plunged into a nose dive.
Aileen Clarke was putting away Easter decorations at her kitchen table when she heard the crash, yelled for her husband to call 911 and rushed outside, where the sleety weather had turned so bad that “my feet were covered with ice.” She knew immediately that the passengers had been killed on impact. Rescue workers found no sentimental teddy bears amid the wreckage – Jessica’s parents didn’t give her toys, preferring power tools so she could “learn by doing.” But National Transportation Safety Board investigators did find something more appropriate to the true purpose of the trip – a smashed TV camera belonging to ABC News. It held no clues. Lloyd Dubroff, so attentive to the other details of promoting his daughter’s exploits, had somehow neglected to put the tape in.
With any luck, Jessica’s senseless death may turn out to be the publicity stunt to end all publicity stunts – at least those involving children in potential peril. Most pilots are incensed at the pilot (Reid) for taking off under risky conditions and possibly subjecting general aviation to more regulation (box, page 27). Most parents are incensed at the Dubroffs for letting their own egos (the trip was Lloyd Dubroff’s idea) jeopardize a child’s safety. And media folks are asking some hard questions of themselves, such as why they didn’t ask some hard questions before the folly began.
One of those questions is this: why was a 7-year-old allowed to fly a plane in the first place? Children under 14 can’t drive a car, even a driver’s ed model equipped with dual steering wheel and brakes on the instructor’s side. But in aviation, while licenses aren’t granted until the age of 16, people of any age can legally operate controls in the pilot’s seat, not just in midair but during takeoffs and landings. The consequences have been disastrous before. In 1994 a Russian commercial pilot allowed his 15-year-old son to take the controls of an Aeroflot flight in midair. Moments later the plane crashed over Siberia, killing all 75 aboard.
Sounding defensive, aviation experts responded almost unanimously by stressing that Jessica and other child pilots are not really flying the planes; the instructors are. One aviator went so far as to say it might as well have been “a duffel bag” in the lefthand seat where Jessica sat. Lisa Blair Hathaway, Jessica’s mother, went on television amid her grief because “I can’t bear the thought of them changing anything” in aviation. She said heatedly: “Joe Reid is not 7 years old. He was in control. He was a quarter-inch away. What do you think, he had his hands in his pocket?”
Well, perhaps for a few seconds. A “stall” takes place when the nose is lifted at too sharp an angle, a mistake more likely to have been made by Jessica than by Reid. By the time the Cessna was clearly in trouble, as preliminary crash analysis indicated, Reid was probably in control, but it might have been too late. The plane’s problems went beyond the rain, 38-degree temperatures and winds gusting to 30 knots. At 2.75 miles, visibility was below the minimum of three miles without instrument guidance, which required special clearance from air control but was not by itself disastrous. A more serious problem might have been that Cheyenne’s airport is at an elevation of 6,150 feet, among the highest in the United States. If he hadn’t adjusted it, Reid’s sea-level fuel mixture may have been too “lean” to power out of the stall, especially with the plane overweight.
The recriminations didn’t take long. “It was sheer stupidity on the part of the instructor,” said John Howie, a Texas pilot and aviation lawyer. “This is criminal-type behavior.” Members of Congress who said nothing in recent years when more than a dozen children, 8 to 11 years old, flew long distances, were suddenly in a lather, too, with committee chairmen assailing lax rules. “There’s no defense against idiots on the ground or in the air,” said John McLucas, a former FAA administrator. “But obviously the FAA is now going to have to do some regulating.”
The finger-pointing inevitably extends to Jessica’s parents, who planned the trip when their daughter had been taking flying lessons for only five months. Even after Jessica’s death, Hathaway defended the idea of children flying. “You look at Jess and tell me how you can question that,” she said. “Have you seen a 7-year-old shine like that? She had room to be; she had room to have a life. Jess did what she enjoyed: she had a full, wonderful, wonderful, exquisite life.”
Much has been made of Jessica’s New Age upbringing in Pescadero, Calif. She was born at home (underwater) to unmarried parents who later split, home-schooled, taught vegetarian values and Pete Seeger songs, allowed no TV and urged to work in a riding stable, where she earned money to send to a poor child in India. But the more relevant parental character traits are right out of the American mainstream: old-fashioned publicity-seeking. Before beginning the journey at Half Moon Bay airport outside San Francisco, Lloyd Dubroff spent $1,300 buying 200 special baseball caps to give to friends and reporters. And he made two efforts (one through a handwritten note from Jessica) to persuade the White House to send President Bill Clinton up in their plane or at least to meet them. The White House did not respond favorably.
So why did the media? Headlines touting aviation exploits extend back to the early part of the century. Amelia Earhart, Jessica’s hero, felt pressure from promoters and the press to complete dangerous flights and may have died over the Pacific in 1937 in part because of it. Jessica would have turned 8 in May, voiding her chance for the record. That caused some anxiety. So did the growing expectations of the media that the flight would meet a certain timetable. As Ted Koppel noted on “Nightline” after the crash, “We feed one another, those of you looking for publicity, and those of us looking for stories.” Even the Guinness Book of World Records now shies away from citing exploits (including rapid eating) that may endanger lives. Still, press reports of Guinness’s 1989 decision to exclude child aviation records mostly missed that Guinness offered to put Jessica Dubroff in its museum had she completed the flight.
For the press, the real lesson may be that there’s a big difference between covering Charles Lindbergh (or even Evel Knievel, the daredevil motorcyclist) and turning a 7-year-old into yet more fodder for the American hype machine. From now on, press releases touting child exploits that might be dangerous should be tossed where they belong – into the circular file.
But even if the media exercise a bit more caution the next time, the Lisa Hathaways and Lloyd Dubroffs of the world will still take risks to project their own dreams through their children. “I’ll fly ’til I die,” Jessica had said. At the crash site, her sister, Jasmine Dubroff, 3, picked up a balsa-wood model airplane left by a mourner and began playing with it. Her mother looked down at her, and smiled.
