After 7-year-old Jessica Dubroff’s quest to become the world’s youngest cross-country pilot ended in a fatal crash, an intriguing question crossed my mind: What if she had made it?
Would she be celebrated as the Amelia Earhart of the grade-school set? Might there have been grand, glorious headlines and lead stories on the evening news? Product endorsements? How about the cover of People magazine? Appearances by her and her family on Oprah?
Ah, what might have been. A country hungry for good news might have lapped it up. But the country got bad news instead. It was not to be. On the second day of her journey, according to news reports, little Jessica’s plane took a nose dive as it apparently was trying to circle back to the airport in Cheyenne, Wyo., in a fierce rainstorm. Her father, Lloyd Dubroff, and a flight instructor, Joe Reid, were also killed.
Now, instead of celebration, there is sorrow and there are questions, like, how did it happen? Was the 52-year-old Reid, who was sitting next to Jessica behind dual controls in accordance with federal safety regulations, reluctant to take the controls for fear of technically invalidating Jessica’s feat? Were she and her companions too caught up in a combination of media hype and time pressures to think straight?
Did they feel, as Mike Overly, editor of The Aviation Safety Monitor, speculates, that her record attempt could not wait, that she would have turned 8 on May 5, which would have made her too old to beat the record, and that maybe the pressure caused the three to fail to think twice before taking off in blowing rain.
Some, taking the latter view, blame the intense competitiveness of American society, filtered down to its youngest members by overzealous parents who live vicariously through the experiences of their children.
Mozart knew about stage mothers and dads. But there seems to be something new in today’s atmosphere that has caused the old stage-door-parenting phenomenon to take an even more bizarre turn in recent years. Something seems to have caused the old competitiveness to lose whatever moorings it might have had in common sense.
Call it the New Exceptionalism. It is not enough anymore to merely be good or even to be careful. One must be exceptional at something, whether it is bad or good. If you are exceptionally good at something, you might get great honors. If you are exceptionally naughty, you may wind up as a guest on a television talk show. Either way, you might hit the jackpot of being famous for its own sake. You can go from nobody to celebrity, just by telling the world who you, your spouse or your children have slept with. Is this a great era or what?
Fortunately, a few sober minds are trying to put the brakes on. It is sobering to note that one place little Jessica’s success would not have been celebrated was at the Guinness Book of World Records. Nor would it have been commemorated by the National Aeronautic Association. Both decided to stop keeping official records in the “youngest pilot” category a few years ago. As one association spokesperson said a few years ago, “It just got to be ridiculous.”
Indeed, it did. Still is. In recent years the age of the youngest cross-country pilot has gotten younger to the point where it has ceased to be interesting and begun to be dangerous. Two 9-year-olds completed separate flights in 1988 and 1989 before the NAA stopped keeping records. A 7-year-old San Antonio boy was less than a month older than Jessica when he set the current unofficial record in 1991 by flying from San Diego to Kill Devil Hills, N.C., site of the Wright brothers historic flight.
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How much farther was it going to go? Pre-school?
And how much longer will it be before the federal government decides adolescent cross-country flyers, cute as they are, also constitute a menace to themselves, to those who fly with them and to the rest of us down below?
You have to be 16 to get behind the wheel of a car. That’s not too long to wait to get behind the wheel–or the control stick–of an airplane. Technically, you must be at least 16 to get a pilot’s license. Jessica’s father enabled her to circumvent that by seating her next to a licensed pilot, who was only to take the controls in an emergency.
One hates to get in the way of a remarkably gifted child, as Jessica is reported to have been. “I fly for joy,” she said. “I just enjoy being up in the air.” But, in the wake of her death, one sees the mammoth difference between her short hops around her California home and the perils of a cross-country journey. We, as a country, should never look upon pre-teen flyers with the same uncritical eye we had before the tragedy of Jessica Dubroff.
“Protect me from what I want,” reads a creation by pop artist Jenny Holzer.
Sometimes somebody should. Even if we cannot stop some kids from flying into danger, we need not cheer them on.