Kathleen Johnston Jarboe

2004 Chesapeake Associated Press Award (small dailies): Best Sports Feature

Nancy Lynn enjoys the risk in job as aerobatic pilot

The Daily Record (Baltimore, MD)

October 1, 2004 Friday

Copyright 2004 Dolan Media Newswires

Section: NEWS; General news

Length: 2361 words

Byline: Kathleen Johnston Jarboe

Pete Lynn is the sensible one in the family, his mother says.

The tall 16-year-old gives the instructions on using the parachute as his mother preps for flight.

If the plane gets in trouble, she'll flip it upside down and pop the hatch. Release your safety harnesses and count to two before you open the chute, Pete explains.

The parachute straps loop around my legs and chest. As he talks, Pete fastens what seems like an endless amount of buckles on my parachute. We are in a hangar just yards from the tiny runway at Bay Bridge Airport.

He rattles on like a college professor explaining the dynamics of the stunt plane that is light enough to be wheeled by him alone onto the airstrip.

"It's not the plane that is the problem. It is the pilot usually," he says about needing the safety device.

If Pete is the sensible one, that would make his mother, aerobatics instructor Nancy Lynn, the risk-taker. She stands on the other side of the hangar. She has long strawberry-blond hair and declines to give her age to reporters anymore. "I don't want to be typecast."

While Pete talks, Nancy Lynn, owner of Lynn Aviation Inc., drinks water to hydrate herself for the flight -- a precaution.

"I do know a few people who have had to bail," she mentions like a footnote to Pete's lecture.

She also knows people who have crashed planes. Her business partner died last fall in an airplane accident. The crash stunned Lynn and closed her plane-based business for months.

But she knows I know this. She mentions instead her own emergency landing in a Queenstown farm field in 1995 when her plane's nose began to fall off after completing an aerobatic move.

"I'm so trained to react quickly. I'm sure I was scared " but a part of me was thinking I get to do an emergency landing," Lynn says about the event.

Lynn says taking risks is necessary to living fully. And for her, risk means climbing into a two-seater airplane and teaching people how to do loops, pull out of spins and performing some even more complicated maneuvers herself for air shows.

Up and away

As we ascend, the sparkling water, Kent Island's Route 8 and the grassy fields at the end of the airstrip gradually grow more map-like. From a couple hundred feet in the air, I realize Kent Island actually is an island.

It's really a different perspective up here, Lynn says.

She tells me we are going to do a move called a hammerhead. The plane veers upward, sucking us into our seats. The blazing sun fills the front glass. And the g-force gauge measures about three to four times the force of gravity.

Look out to your left, Lynn says.

There is a dark, steel right triangle on the wing that serves as a sort of giant protractor. The spine of it is perpendicular to the green-brown blur of land below.

The red and white-striped Extra 300 L is peeling away from the earth in rocket fashion.

Lynn then pulls the plane to the left and it plummets nose-first back to the earth before she straightens it out to fly horizontally again.

She carries a barf bag, but says her passengers or students have never had to use it yet.

One student calls her a demanding but sensitive trainer.

"She will find out what your limits are and make you fly to them," says Robert H.W. Saltsman Jr., an audiologist from Lutherville who wants to compete in aerobatic contests one day. He started training with Lynn in 2002.

Lynn practices and performs much more complicated moves for her air shows, including end-over-end tumbles and an upside-down hover maneuver where she slows the plane to a normal stall speed of 40 m.p.h.

The discipline requires mental and physical training.

"To me the combination of that is -- I don't want to use the word addictive -- but that's what it is. It's mesmerizing," Lynn says.

The Annapolis woman is somewhat of a free spirit. She groans slightly about meeting me at 9:30 on a Monday morning, arrives late and is still debating whether to fly to North Carolina later that day to visit an aerobatic camp.

Her black-and-pink-striped Converse high-tops match her shirt. They let her feel the rudder pedals of the plane better, she says. Lynn has 11 more pairs of the Chuck Taylors to match a variety of outfits: olive suede; yellow leather; baby blue; and a pair with a red, white and blue flag design.

Friends describe her as alive and vibrant.

She is known to have taught a niece to do what the girl loves by leading her in impromptu handstands in the girl's bedroom. Lynn, forgetting she wore spiked heels that day, left imprints in the wall.

"You can always count on Nancy to be outrageously funny," said Pat Obert, a Tucson, Ariz., resident who has known Lynn for about 15 years. "Nancy is one of the most positive people you can run up against."

Reality

Lynn admits she avoids taking men she dates to movies with airplane accidents. She doesn't want them worrying unnecessarily.

Still risk isn't theoretical to Lynn.

Her husband barely survived a crash in 1993 after practicing stunt moves. He broke his hip, sliced his heel and lost an eye when his face smashed into the instrument panel as the plane hit the ground. In 2000, he died from brain cancer.

And last fall Lynn lost her business partner who owned 25 percent of her airplane when he crashed the acrobatic plane Oct. 12.

Lynn turns pensive as we talk in a cafe near the Bay Bridge Airport, sometimes removing and putting back on a pair of sunglasses that wrap around her eyes.

She says she doesn't talk about these events much even to friends. She is surprised she is telling a reporter. She doesn't want me to write much about her husband. It's too sacred, she says.

Lynn had an inner sense her husband would be okay after his crash. But her business partner's accident was different.

"I knew he was dead," Lynn says about Mark Damisch's collision. "It was sort of a weird intuition."

Lynn's hangar at the Bay Bridge airport looks a lot like a giant garage. It has lawn chairs, boxes and some sea kayaks for passing the time. The airstrip starts just feet from the Chesapeake Bay.

On the Sunday evening the 37-year-old died, Lynn and his dog sat waiting for him to bring the plane back. She wanted to take her second flight of the day after giving lessons to a student.

Then Damisch's German shepherd stood up abruptly and began looking around. She told the dog he would be back shortly. But it kept looking at the sky.

"All of a sudden I had this horrible sensation," Lynn says.

A call to a nearby airport to check on Damisch's whereabouts confirmed the feeling. There had been an accident.

A witness said the plane was in a vertical dive when it hit the ground, according to Federal Aviation Administration records.

Lynn cancelled plans to attend a party that night with some of her aviation friends.

"I had to hear myself say Mark had died in a plane crash," she says.

What caused Damisch's plane to tumble from the sky near Queen Anne is unknown. Lynn thinks the cautious pilot somehow surpassed his g-force limits that day and blacked out while practicing aerobatic maneuvers.

"It brought home the fact that there is no margin for error in this kind of flying," she says.

There are a lot of pauses when she talks about Damisch. One friend says it's because she searches for the right way to say something. The event was also traumatic to Lynn.

"I think she is still grieving for her partner. It was a tragic loss. It affected all of us," student Robert Saltsman said.

The tragedy brought up questions Lynn has faced before about her career choice.

Lynn worked as a manufacturing manager at Procter & Gamble Co. for years before her love of flying and the desire for a more flexible career after the birth of her son led her to aerobatics.

When her husband was diagnosed with cancer, Lynn said she reconsidered the move.

Friend Pat Obert remembers a conversation with Lynn at an airport ramp around that time. It was a random discussion that began after Obert made a casual remark about how life could be so puzzling.

Lynn responded more profoundly, talking about how you had to keep walking when life got foggy, according to Obert.

Then she told Obert, "There are times when I question teaching."

But Lynn concluded that it couldn't be wrong if she loved it so much, according to Obert.

"Maybe, I figured, it's not what the world picks out for women. But just the fact that I picked out a dream called aerobatics. Doesn't that say to every woman that maybe they should have their dream?" Obert recalled Lynn saying.

Future

Lynn waited months before seeking a loan for another plane after Damisch's accident. She knew she would continue flying. But she didn't know in what way.

Her specialized plane that could withstand forces 10 times the strength of gravity had been crushed like an accordion. And it was time for another talk with her son Pete about her career.

The conversation was similar to the one they had when her husband passed away.

"I'm going to talk to you about flying because it's what I do for a living but there are a lot of other things I can do," Lynn remembers telling her son, referring to the perceived risk of her profession.

Aerobatic pilots flinch at the word stunt. Perhaps it is because the word blurs the professional nature of the sport, says pilot Pat Obert.

But the word also drags up images pilots don't want to remember, Obert says.

Aerobatic pilots belong to a small, tight-knit community. The International Aerobatics Club has about 5,000 members and only about 900 compete throughout the United States.

"When you are in aerobatics, you know people either as an acquaintance or friend that you lose to aviation accidents," Obert says. She can remember a year where she lost four people she knew to such accidents.

"You don't want to think about the ones you lost even if they died doing the thing they loved," she said.

The FAA doesn't track the number of airplane accidents involving aerobatics. But a rough count of the agency's accident reports since 2001 shows about 42 incidents involving the sport. The crashes resulted in 37 deaths.

Still pilots say their profession isn't hazardous if the proper precautions are taken.

"It looks a lot more dangerous than it is," said David Whaley, a Henderson, N.C., car dealer who takes lessons from Lynn and hopes to perform in the future. "It just looks spectacular."

Many pilots learn aerobatics for safety reasons. Among other things, the instruction teaches pilots how to recover from an accidental spin. The skill was once a requirement for obtaining a standard pilot license.

Guidelines say aerobatics should only be done in planes designed for the specialized flying. Industry experts also advise pilots to avoid flying too low, watch their g-force tolerance and to stay hydrated.

The increased force of gravity felt in some maneuvers can cause the blood to drain from pilots' heads. Most people will black out at around four to five "g" without specialized training.

Lynn works out daily, lifts weights and hangs like a bat in her home to build her tolerance. She also flies constantly and trains with the past coach of the U.S. World Aerobatic Team to hone her abilities. Some of her maneuvers create g forces close to nine times the force of gravity.

Lynn's son was appalled at the suggestion she stop flying.

"But it's what you do," she recalls Pete saying.

Still the teen-ager recognizes the perils of the profession.

Pete gave Lynn flying guidelines after his father died. Don't fly too low, and no show-off landings or takeoffs.

When asked if he wants to learn aerobatics in the future, he responds, "One aerobatic pilot in the family is enough."

Pete's rules run contrary to Lynn's license plate plaque on her black SUV. The gift from a student reads: "Fly fast. Fly hard. Fly low and inverted."

Still Pete, who helps with the business and announces her moves at shows, says she obeys his rules.

Obert says safety is paramount to Lynn.

"Nancy is always cognizant of her responsibility to her son before she goes into the sky," she said.

Risk-taking

Lynn often finds herself talking about risk lately. Over the years, she's appeared several times on the Discovery Wings Channel and in aviation safety videos. She also has given several motivational and safety speeches. Public speaking is another career venue Lynn has considered.

"You have to define what a risk is, why it is a risk. " Does the benefit outweigh the possible negative consequences?" she says.

The topic comes up a lot when she talks with women. Some are curious; others are skeptical of her career choices, she says.

Women don't get enough schooling in risk-taking, according to Lynn.

"As a kid I wasn't expected to be a rough and tumble. So you can get away with sitting on the sidelines," she says. "I discovered early on that I didn't like sitting on the sidelines. I didn't like myself as much."

When Lynn was 9, she was the favorite to win the school's spelling bee. Her teacher was grooming her to take the prize because she had won the previous year. Preparing for the competition though meant extra pressure and homework.

Lynn said she started to dislike the pressure. So when it came time for her to spell "azure" during the competition's third round, she misspelled the word on purpose.

"It got me out of a lot more studying and pressure. But then I was really stunningly disappointed with myself. I didn't step up to the plate. And I never really forgot that," she says. She's hated the word ever since.

Lynn takes satisfaction in her accomplishments as a pilot.

Just 6 percent of active pilots are women, according to the association Women in Aviation International.

Lynn's presence can create a stir at air shows. She and Pete are the only mother-and-son team in the air show world, she says. And sometimes fathers will line up with their daughters afterward so they can meet a woman aerobatic pilot.

"It's really touching," she says. "I think I'm the luckiest woman in the world. I got this great kid. I get to do what I love. I get to touch other people's lives through speaking and flying."

Lynn is planning to perform in eight shows this year. She hopes to expand those performances to 20 next year and perhaps find a sponsor to help defray her costs.

When asked about the risk, fellow aerobatic pilot Pat Obert responds, "Is aviation risky? Life is risky."

Classification

Language: ENGLISH

Subject: SAFETY (90%); AIRCRAFT ACCIDENTS (77%); CLIMBING (77%); SAFETY, ACCIDENTS & DISASTERS (77%); COLLEGE & UNIVERSITY PROFESSORS (69%)

Company: LYNN AVIATION INC (95%)

Industry: AIRCRAFT PILOTS (90%); AIRPORT RUNWAYS (90%); AIRCRAFT (89%); AIRCRAFT ACCIDENTS (77%); AIRPORTS (77%); AVIATION INDUSTRY (77%); PASSENGER & CARGO AIRCRAFT (77%); BOTTLED WATER (70%); COLLEGE & UNIVERSITY PROFESSORS (69%)

Geographic: MARYLAND, USA (73%)

Load-Date: October 1, 2004
Nancy Lynn enjoys the risk in job as aerobatic pilot

Organization: NATIONAL LABOR RELATIONS BOARD (54%); NATIONAL LABOR RELATIONS BOARD (54%)

Industry: NAICS484110 GENERAL FREIGHT TRUCKING, LOCAL (85%); SIC4212 LOCAL TRUCKING WITHOUT STORAGE (85%); TRUCKING (90%)

Geographic: BALTIMORE, MD, USA (79%); MARYLAND, USA (92%); PENNSYLVANIA, USA (79%)

Load-Date: July 16, 2004
USF Red Star closes down after union strike