Chapter 15

By September 1991 I’d spent two years on relentless practice, flying airshows on weekends, practicing competition sequences on weekdays, and steeling myself every day to climb into the airplane and overcome my fear. Each day, I made myself drive out to the airport, perform the preflight, and go through the ritual I’d made a habit. Each day, I told myself I was going to fly no matter what, even if I didn’t feel like it. Build the structure, day by day and cell by cell. Follow the principle of induction.

I spent four hours out of each day to get a forty-five-minute flight out of Livermore Airport. On the drive there, I listened to books on tape, went over sequences in my head, and dreamed of winning a spot on the US Aerobatic Team—a dream I still hadn’t confided to most of my friends. It seemed too pretentious to proclaim such a lofty goal. Too big a dream for me.

But I’ve learned this about having a dream: It doesn’t matter if you tell anybody or not. What matters is that you make some progress in that direction every day. Seeds don’t know they will one day become trees, but they spend each day pushing out roots to gather nutrients, and sending tiny green shoots up toward the sunlight. This kind of pushing forward includes not only plant growth but the evolution of life in general as well as human development and the formation of human society. These are classic examples of what Nobel Prize–winning scientist Ilya Prigogine called dissipative structures, where “dissipative” refers to trading energy for growth. People have choices to make every day. Do we want to push forward into the unknown, or do we want to retreat? Life is an open system, a system that exchanges elements with its environment. Systems grow, remain static, or decay. Growth is always a little more difficult than stasis.

But in the end, the unrelenting persistence of growth is what has made a difference in human history. Life is relentless, and if you allow yourself to be fully alive, you too will become a force of nature.

I was going to push forward and fly two thousand miles to Denison, Texas, to try out for the United States Aerobatic Team. All my efforts, all my years of struggling to overcome my terror, the thousands of dollars I’d poured into this sport—it would all come down to a few minutes in front of seven judges I’d never met, out on the dusty flats of Texas at an old military airport about an hour north of Dallas.

On September 7, 1991, I loaded up my Pitts and took off from Livermore, heading southeast to Lawrence, Kansas, where I’d spend two weeks with a trainer before I competed in the Lawrence Aerobatic Contest, my final competition before the tryouts. First stop: Barstow, California. I fueled up quickly in the blazing desert sun, filled my water bottle, and jumped back in the plane. My next stop was Gallup, New Mexico. East of here, I loved the terrain—the red rocks and finely carved canyons of the high desert, fringed by the deep green of the mountains. At the end of the first day, I landed at Amarillo, Texas, after flying 1,300 miles in 8.2 hours. I slept soundly in a cheap motel and woke up early the next morning for a relatively short, 400-mile flight to Lawrence.

On Friday, September 20, I flew to Grayson County Airport in Denison, Texas, site of the US National Aerobatic Championships, and joined 120 pilots from all over the US. We came together to find out, at the culmination of the aerobatic season, who were the very best pilots in each of the five categories, and in Unlimited, who would be chosen to represent our nation in the Olympics of aviation, the World Aerobatic Championships, to be held in France in July 1992.

No one was allowed to practice in the aerobatic box before the contest, so I found a hangar on the field, unloaded my bags, and headed off to practice a few miles to the west. I planned to get in three practice flights a day for each of the following three days, so I’d be super sharp by the time the contest started on Monday.

The fields around Grayson County Airport spread out in dark green swaths below me, and an acrid, artificial scent hung in the air above the crops. Perhaps there was a refinery or factory upwind. I never found out.

It was a very different terrain, and culture, from California. Driving back to the hotel with a group of pilots after a day out on the airfield, we saw a spotted white dog, dead, in the middle of the highway. As we slowed to drive around him, I saw that the spots were large beetles feeding on his corpse. By the side of the road, a small creature scuttled along. It was brown and hairy.

“Is that a tarantula?” I asked, feeling sick to my stomach.

Phil Brown, a top-ranked Advanced pilot, called, “Stop! I want to collect him.” He grabbed a widemouthed jar out of his duffel bag, scooped up the monstrous spider, and bore it triumphantly back to the car. I cringed while the other pilots made jokes.

“Sure wouldn’t want to find that fellow in my Pitts during a flight,” said John Michaels, an Intermediate pilot I’d just met.

“If I find a passenger like that, I’m jumping,” said Jake Rogers, a large, garrulous mechanic who’d served as one of the maintenance crew at the US Nationals for over ten years. I wouldn’t want to fly aerobatics with a tarantula on the seat beside me, although I thought bailing out of a $40,000 plane simply because of a spider might be a little extreme. I owed Jake a huge debt for finding out that the spinner backing plate of my propeller was cracked the previous year at Nationals. Jake donated a good two hours to pulling the prop, finding a replacement backing plate, and reinstalling it on my Pitts. He then refused to take any payment other than for parts. Without his efforts, I wouldn’t have been able to fly in the contest at all that year.

His kindness as well as the support of many of the other pilots repaired a part of me that had been broken since childhood. As I worked alongside other pilots on my journey to the Unlimited Aerobatic Championships, I was also rebuilding the part of me that was damaged and distrustful and had been unable to give and receive help, friendship, and love. It deepened my relationship with Ben, and our marriage became stronger as we learned to support and respect each other as independent people.

* * *

Monday was a hot and humid day. A long lineup of pilots waited in the Unlimited category. They were twenty-eight of the best pilots in the country trying out for the ten top slots. Five of the slots would go to men, and five to women, since international competition was segregated by gender at the time. Some of the men complained, saying it was easier for women to make the team because there were far fewer female pilots in the sport. It was true that there were fewer women trying out; however, the top female pilots consistently scored better than the men as a group. As a matter of fact, the women’s average score was higher than the men’s.

No one pointed that out, though.

Similarly, I’d been told multiple times that the only reason I was doing so well in Unlimited was because I weighed one hundred pounds. It couldn’t possibly have anything to do with my skill. It was true that weighing less gave me an advantage. The better your power-to-weight ratio, the easier it was to fly certain figures. But the sad truth was that my airplane—a stock (which means unmodified) 200-horsepower Pitts—was at a tremendous disadvantage compared with those of my wealthier competitors, many of whom were flying airplanes that had 300 or even 350 horsepower and had been highly modified and customized at great expense.

The fact was that everyone had advantages and disadvantages, as a group of us decided over cards and beer one night in the hangar, and in the end, it really did come down to who flew the best, and who was able to rise above their personal disadvantages and make the most of their advantages.

Phil said, “The only exception might be if the contest organizers deliberately designed a sequence to eliminate the lower-powered airplanes.”

I scoffed. “I can’t believe they’d do that.”

“I haven’t seen it in regional competition, but this is Nationals.”

Little did I know what was about to happen.

Team selection in Unlimited would be based on three flights—the Known Compulsory, Freestyle, and Unknown—each about six to eight minutes long. I’d been flying the Known Compulsory all season and could handle it in various types of wind and at different air temperatures, field elevations, and levels of humidity. Heat, humidity, and high altitude cause wings to generate less lift and engines to produce less thrust, lowering the overall performance of the plane. Competition pilots need to make constant adjustments based on these changing factors. It’s another math equation.

Freestyles were designed by individual pilots to showcase their own strengths, but each routine had to adhere to specific constraints. The difficulty factors of the maneuvers had to fall within a precise range, and certain figures such as a tailslide, rolling turn, or spin had to be included. I’d been tweaking my Freestyle for a couple of years. One of my specialties in math was a technique called combinatorial optimization, and creating an ideal Freestyle was exactly this type of problem. Combinatorial optimization allowed me to take the many required variables, the strengths and weaknesses of the airplane and the pilot, and juggle and arrange them into a sequence that expressed artistry while maximizing the potential scores for each figure. Certain maneuvers were known to be more prone to subjective grading from the judges. For example, it’s difficult for an unaided human to judge a 45-degree angle by eye, the judges didn’t use external aids, and the flights were not filmed. As a result, most pilots minimized the number of 45-degree lines in their Freestyles.

But there were many more subtle variables to optimize. For example, the Pitts, unlike the more expensive monoplanes like the Extra, was notorious for “flopping the wrong way”—in other words, swinging its wheels up instead of down or vice versa—during a tailslide and earning a zero. A zero on any figure was the kiss of death at the higher levels of competition. You had to score on all the maneuvers to win or place. To make certain my Pitts flopped in the right direction after a tailslide, I needed to enter the slide at a minimum of 180 miles per hour. Fortunately, that simply required setting up the figure beforehand to make sure I ended up with at least that much. You could adjust most high-speed maneuvers to exit at any desired airspeed, as long as you were willing to give up some altitude. It merely required a lot of planning before the flight as well as during the sequence. And luckily, planning—and combinatorial optimization—was my strong suit.

Just like in the regional competitions, the Unknown sequence is revealed to the pilots trying out for the team a mere eighteen hours before flight time. In my early days in the sport, the Unknown frequently tripped me up. Although I could practice and prepare the other two sequences for as long as I had time and money, there was no way to prepare for the Unknown. In a way, it mirrored my social development as a child. For years, I was poor at casual conversation. Writing was fine, because I could always revise, and I was okay in situations where I could practice beforehand. But free-form conversations, where I had no idea what was going to happen, often flummoxed me. The comments of my classmates passed above my head, as they made references to cultural norms I had no clue about. To handle a conversation requires an ability to move fluidly among the topics in a kind of verbal dance. It had taken me well into adulthood to learn how to participate in a group conversation.

I had learned, over months of relentless practice, to produce that kind of instant response in flying, that kind of extreme flexibility in the Unknown. I’d learned to dance in the air. I’d done it despite my fear of imminent death, a fear that was burdensome—and rare—among top-ranked competition aerobatic pilots.

I asked Phil Brown one evening over gin rummy if he ever felt afraid while flying aerobatics. He took some time to respond and finally said, “Well, there was this one time when I was flying with my ten-year-old son in a two-seat Pitts over mountainous terrain. I looked down at those craggy mountains and realized if the engine quit, there was no place we could land. That gave me a twinge.” He shrugged. “But other than that, no. It doesn’t bother me, and I’ve never been afraid.”

I couldn’t help thinking of all the emotional energy I expended on dealing with my fear—energy and time I could have used to work on my flying. But I didn’t want to lose my fear completely, because fear does have its benefits. It helped me make the right decisions and kept me alive. The extra spice and thrill it put into my flying led to higher scores from the judges. They often remarked on the underlying excitement and vitality they saw in my routines. But still, I wished my fear wasn’t quite so overpowering.

* * *

Late Wednesday afternoon, I walked back over the wide expanse of cracked white concrete to see a crowd clustered around the scoreboard in front of the terminal. Despite the heat and humidity, I ran to the board, almost tripping over an exposed cable on the tarmac. I’d flown a clean and sharp Known Compulsory on Monday, and my carefully designed Freestyle earlier that morning had felt good. But it was always hard to tell from inside the cockpit how well you were flying. It all depended on what the judges noticed.

I stood at the back of the crowd, my view blocked, nervously shifting from foot to foot. I didn’t want to be rude and push my way through, but I couldn’t help wishing I was a little taller.

At last, Jake noticed me standing at the back and gave me a thumbs-up. “Great job!”

What does that mean? Let me see the board already!

“Give her some room,” he said, and a small gap opened up beside him. I squeezed through.

I skimmed the long list of twenty-eight pilot names and scores on the whiteboard, searching for mine. When I saw it, I yelped out loud. I’d made it into seventh place overall after the first two sequences! I couldn’t believe it. I only vaguely felt Jake pounding me on the back.

“Congratulations!”

I checked the numbers again. Yes, the judges had liked my Freestyle. With that flight, I’d even improved my position over the Known Compulsory. I’d scored third place in the Free among all the women.

It finally felt real that I might have a chance to make the US Aerobatic Team. It was within reach. Now it would hinge on my performance in the Unknown.

The Unknown would be a challenge for me, especially since my plane was relatively underpowered. You can use extra horsepower to muscle through mistakes in the figures. But I didn’t have that option. Out of the top twenty pilots, I was one of only three flying a stock Pitts. Most of the other airplanes cost at least twice as much as mine—in some cases six times as much. The pilots were all aerobatic veterans, extremely skilled and experienced. Several of the pilots were independently wealthy and spent all their time on flying. Others were airline pilots making $200,000 a year, doctors, lawyers, securities brokers, or business owners. I realized at one point that if I were to produce a graph or visualization, like I did at work, of the demographics of the pilots competing here, I’d be notable as an outlier. It’d been less than five years since my first solo as a pilot. My income level was half that of any other competitor. I was the second-youngest pilot trying out. I was also the only Latina competing in Unlimited, and I’d later realize that no Latina had ever made the US Aerobatic Team.

Thursday, September 24, was a humid day with temperatures in the nineties. A gritty haze topped by a thin overcast hung above the field. The air felt like a wet rag. Despite this, the morning started out with some excitement when Jake Rogers found an all-too-familiar, but empty, widemouth glass jar on the seat of his airplane when he went to roll it out of the hangar.

Phil was laughing so hard he could hardly stand straight. “Of course I didn’t leave a spider in your plane!”

“Where’s your tarantula?” Jake demanded. “I want to see it.”

“Sorry, I let it go yesterday.”

Jake practically turned his airplane upside down inspecting the interior. Finally, he announced to Phil, “If I’m flying my sequence, and I feel a hairy leg on the back of my neck, I’m jumping, and you’re paying me forty thousand dollars for a new airplane.”

It was three in the afternoon when the Unlimited Unknown sequences were handed out to the pilots. At first, I was eager to see the routine that would be so critical to all the pilots in our category. Then, as I read through the sequence, I felt lightheaded. I read it through four times, my stomach twisting more tightly with every pass. If there had ever been a sequence designed to weed out lower-powered airplanes, this was it. It was basically unflyable for a stock Pitts like mine. It contained a rolling turn in the center of the box, followed immediately by a tailslide at the upwind end.

No! I’d need 180 miles per hour after the rolling turn to avoid flopping the wrong way in the tailslide and zeroing the figure. But my Pitts always exited a rolling turn at 140. It was a limitation of physics and aerodynamics.

In a monoplane like the Extra, it’d be no problem. You’d exit the rolling turn at a fast cruise, well beyond 140 miles per hour, and have sufficient power to pull up immediately for a tailslide. It was easy to make a monoplane flop the right way. No problem.

This is so unfair! I wanted to wail. Although I was currently in third place among the women, a zero in the tailslide would wipe out my entire lead and put me well out of the running. It looked like my dream of making the US Aerobatic Team would remain a dream. At least for this year.

Perhaps over the next two years, I could save money, work more hours at my jobs, bank all my income, and maybe afford a used four-cylinder Extra. It would cost at least twice as much as my Pitts, which already stretched me almost beyond my limit financially. Some people were saying the two-hundred-horsepower, four-cylinder monoplanes would be obsolete by the following year, and six-cylinder monoplanes would be required for world competition.

Maybe this was all just an impossible dream, and I should give it up. A friend of mine had already counseled me that it was a mistake to pour so much of my energy into flying at this point in my life. “You’re young; you have plenty of time to fly. Why don’t you start a company and get rich instead, and then come back to flying once you’ve retired with a few million? That’s a much easier path.” Easier to get rich than make the US Aerobatic Team? I’d seen friends and acquaintances get rich in Silicon Valley. But thinking about that path only depressed me. Subsuming everything else in order to make money didn’t feel right. Despite working as an engineer and software developer for many years and loving it, what I enjoyed was the artistic and intellectual thrill of building software, and the creative joy of designing a beautiful and effective algorithm. I was an engineer and a mathematician but also an artist. And flying was my art.

It was how I needed to express myself. It was how I needed to push forward to become the person I knew I could be. I needed to learn to overcome my fear and my early childhood experiences. Flying gave me an accelerated crucible to make that possible. Every lesson I learned in my push to become one of the best aerobatic pilots in the world resonated deeply in my core. To grow as a human being, to be truly alive, I needed to overcome the life-destroying fear inside my heart. And of course, I wanted to win.

Sitting in my dim hotel room that night, I bent over the Unknown sequence once again. There was nothing I could do about the physics or aerodynamics, nor anything I could do about the weather or the limitations of my aircraft. But I could apply my mind, my skill at math and combinatorial optimization, to maximize my potential score on this Unknown.

What if I could somehow find a way to exit the rolling turn at a slightly higher speed? For example, what if I flew the entire maneuver with a slightly downward inclination? Technically, I was supposed to maintain altitude throughout each maneuver, and I’d get scored down if I didn’t. But I’d watched many pilots fly rolling turns, and based on my own experience on the line, I thought I could slightly angle the nose down throughout the maneuver without it being visible to the judges.

I did a quick back-of-the-envelope calculation. Although I’d never tried it, I guessed that I could exit with at least ten extra miles per hour, maybe twenty. So that would get me to 150, maybe 160. But I needed 180.

Hmm. Pilots were supposed to fly all the lines between maneuvers absolutely horizontal. You lost a point off both the previous maneuver and the following maneuver for every 5 degrees of deviation from horizontal. But if I pointed the nose 5 degrees down, although I would lose those points, I’d gain airspeed. What if I maintained a 5-degree nose-down attitude until I reached 180 miles per hour? I would get penalized for descending, and also for exiting the box, but then I could fly the tailslide without flopping the wrong way and getting a zero. Yes, my score would be reduced, but I would lose far fewer points than if I blew the tailslide.

I ran the numbers quickly with my calculator. Yes. That was the best possibility. It wasn’t optimal, but it was optimal for the only plane I had to compete in. If I flew well, even with the downgrade for diving and the box penalty, my overall percentage would be respectable.

I spent several hours that night going over the sequence in my head, visualizing each maneuver, one by one, imagining myself in the airplane, feeling, smelling, hearing everything going on as I flew. I’d have to fly a damn near perfect flight, other than my planned downgrades, to stay in the running. Could I make it work?

Friday morning, September 25, dawned as another hot and humid day. The winds were light, which was both good and bad for me. Good because I wouldn’t need to compensate much for the wind and distort my maneuvers. Bad because it meant that my dive for the tailslide would almost certainly take me well out of the box.

I pushed my airplane to the starting line. Sweat was already running down my face, and my white T-shirt was drenched. The sun shone like a disk of dull brass in a yellowish sky. The air slapped my face like a wet towel. I shoved the tail of my aircraft to move it into position, the cotter pins on the flying wires digging into my palms.

I took a last drink out of my water bottle and jogged a few thousand feet to the outhouse by the side of the runway.

When I came back, it was time to strap in.

“Harnesses and belts?” asked Bill Larson.

“Check!” I gave him a thumbs-up.

Bill leaned close. “Good luck,” he said. “I expect to see you on the team, young lady.”

I grinned and closed my canopy. Soon I was airborne. The air smelled even more like a sweaty towel at altitude. I circled in the holding area, scanning the box markers one more time, picking out landmarks and checking them against the hand-drawn sequence diagram on my panel.

The markers on the ground below went white. It was time to fly.

I dove into the box, wagged my wings, and pulled for the first maneuver. Although I’d never flown this sequence before, it seemed familiar after all the intense hours of visualization. I pulled, rolled to my landmarks, and checked the box markers. Breathing hard, I used all my strength to spin and flow through the routine I’d been living and imagining for the past eighteen hours.

I entered the rolling turn, remembering to keep the nose slightly below the horizon as I rolled and turned, like rubbing my stomach and patting my head at the same time. I had to maintain a constant radius along the horizon while at the same time rolling with a steady beat. It was one of the most difficult aerobatic maneuvers I’d ever done, but it felt good. Lowering the nose by 5 degrees increased the control forces slightly but also gave them more crispness, and I felt it was going well. On exit, I flicked a glance at my airspeed—155 miles per hour. Yes!

I dropped the nose further, and the airplane accelerated—160 miles per hour.

The upwind box markers sailed away beneath me. Thirty-­point penalty for an out-of-the-box exit—Let it go—170 miles per hour … 180. Go!

I pulled hard, nine g’s, to soar into a perfect vertical up and up through the soggy air and into the murky sky. At the very end, I tipped the nose forward just a few degrees, barely enough to nudge the tailslide and flop the right way. I powered down to idle.

It’s always strangely quiet in a tailslide. With the engine at idle and almost no airflow past the cockpit, most sources of noise are absent.

Would the plane fall in the right direction? I held my breath.

So much was waiting on this fragile aerodynamic moment. So much of my life hung on this one instant.

The plane stood still, suspended in the air at the top of its upward thrust, immobile, only its propeller rotating slowly.

There was nothing I could do but hope. Like a twig balanced on the end of a fingertip, the plane paused, its nose pointed straight in the air, the controls slack in my hands, waiting for gravity to tip it one way or another.

Then the plane began to slide backward. I kept the controls centered, my feet braced on the rudder, and both hands gripping the stick.

It had to slide backward a visible amount, but if it slid back too much, it could gain too much speed, potentially damaging the airplane or making the flop so violent that the controls might get torn out of my hands.

The backward slide continued. It was one of the longest I’d ever experienced.

All I could do was hang on.

There was a loud rattle, and a violent rushing of air, and the plane suddenly swapped ends, the nose swinging through a dramatic arc that threw me hard against the belts.

Wheels up, as specified.

Yes! I did it! I sucked in a great gulping breath of relief, shoved the throttle full forward, and concentrated on flying the rest of the sequence. Figure after figure, one at a time, I focused on completing each one with precision and flair. It all went well. My plan had worked.

When I landed, I felt oddly at peace. No matter my standing in the contest at the end, I knew that I had done the best possible job within the limitations of my airplane. If I didn’t make the team, it wouldn’t be because of another personal failure.

Now came the many hours of waiting until the scores came out. I wiped my plane down, fueled it for the flight home, and pushed it back into the hangar. I got on the truck heading out to the judges’ line, where I was an assistant judge in Intermediate, the next category flying.

It was hot out on the line in the dusty Texas fields but tranquil after the tension of my earlier flight. I finally relaxed. I joked with the other judges, enjoyed the highly skilled Intermediate pilots flying their Unknown, helped the judges score the maneuvers, and drank several bottles of water.

At the end of the day, the truck brought us back to the terminal. We all jumped off and made a beeline for the competition whiteboard. The scores were posted.

And there it was. I had done well enough in the Unknown to place twelfth overall in the competition, and fourth among the women. Fourth out of the five team members.

I had made the US Aerobatic Team.