Sunday August 27 12:02 PM ET
22-Year-Olds Try To Fly Around World
By BEN DOBBIN, Associated Press Writer
ROCHESTER, N.Y. (AP) - At a recent air show in Oshkosh, Wis., several people sidled up to the "World Flight 2000'' booth to ask the young aviators the same, carefully phrased question: Do you remember Jessica Dubroff?
"Each one was kind of looking at the ground when they asked,'' said Daniel Dominguez, a bit irked to hear repeated mention of the 7-year-old girl who was killed in 1996 while trying to become the youngest person to fly across the United States.
Dominguez, fellow pilot Chris Wall and photographer Jesse Weisz are embarking from Rochester in a silver-bodied, twin-engine plane Sept. 1 in a bid to become the youngest flight crew on record to circle the globe.
They all turned 22 this year. To some onlookers, notably a few sponsors who held back on donations, that still doesn't seem nearly old enough to be hopping across oceans, over icebergs and war zones, through horizon-blotting clouds.
The crew is downplaying the "youngest'' aspect of the flight. "It'd be a nice thing to set a record but it's not the reason the flight's taking place,'' said Dominguez, who graduated in May with an economics degree from the University of Rochester.
More important is just the sheer adventure of steering 26,500-plus miles eastward in "Dreamcatcher.'' Their 1957 Aero Commander 560E is the same aircraft model once used to ferry President Dwight Eisenhower to his Pennsylvania farm.
Dominguez and Wall, who have logged thousands of flying hours since getting their pilot's licenses at 17, bought the disused plane with a $15,000 loan in 1998. They've refitted it themselves with everything from new propellers to sophisticated avionics and buffed it up like a mirror to reflect its surroundings.
As teachers got wind of the project, schoolchildren frequently showed up at the airport by the busload. They were encouraged to climb into the cockpit, play with the controls, ask questions to their heart's content. The lesson the crew wishes to impart: Work hard enough at it, and big dreams can often be fulfilled.
"There's always an excuse not to go after your dream,'' said Wall, an engineering senior at Rice University in Houston. "We've got to do this now. We don't know if we'll have another opportunity - we'll have too many ties, too many responsibilities.''
Weisz, a film studies graduate from South Orange, N.J., will provide daily photo-and-video updates of the 31/2-month trip on the Internet (www.worldflight2000.org). Youngsters will be able to follow the trio on excursions to volcanoes, reefs, temples, marketplaces and historic homes from Turkey to Fiji and Newfoundland to Nepal.
The longest leg will be a 14-hour, 2,042-mile hop from Hawaii to San Jose, Calif. Flying has "inherent risks,'' Wall said, but he worries more about foul-ups on the ground: landing-permit troubles, getting stranded without an available spare part, or running into "a guy with a machine gun asking questions in some weird language.''
The project is largely self-financed. Dominguez has been busy flying freight, reporting rush-hour traffic jams for radio stations and giving flying lessons. Wall has worked every spare minute as an aircraft mechanic.
Circumnavigating Earth isn't so much of a stretch for the pair from El Paso, Texas, who have been aviation fanatics for as long as they can remember. At age 17, they managed to persuade their parents to let them fly alone from Texas to Alaska. "Both our parents have been very supportive, letting us go out and live our lives,'' Wall said.
In 1989, 11-year-old Tony Aliengena became the youngest pilot to fly around the world. Jessica Dubroff died while trying to break the U.S. cross-country record the California boy had set at age 9. Both children were accompanied by their fathers and other adults.
Aviation history buffs deem it highly unlikely that the oldest crew member aboard any of the estimated 160 or so noncommercial flights around the world since 1924 was as young as 22. Such flights usually make no mention of the crew members' ages.
"Most round-the-world flights have been taken either by daring fliers, people in military service or wealthy folks, and you don't get into that realm without having some age under your belt,'' said Joe Conger of Airchive, a history-of-flight repository in Springfield, Ill.
As for this project's cash crunch - it has drawn an abundance of aircraft equipment and other supplies but less than $30,000 in donations - Conger isn't surprised that sponsors turned out, to Dominguez's amazement, to be "so stingy.''
"It's only natural for grown-ups to disparage young people,'' he said. "Most anyone over 30 who thinks 'Would I have the nerve to do what these kids want to do?' decides 'Heck, no - they must be crazy.'''
Around-the-world flights were a big deal between the 1920s and 1940s "when it was important just to prove it could be done - and done faster and safer and to pioneer new aircraft and new technologies,'' said Bob Van Der Linden, curator of aeronautics at the National Air and Space Museum.
Nowadays, he said, the world-weary attitude has become, "If you want to fly all the way around the world, then why leave?''
On the Net:
World Flight 2000 aviators:
http://www.worldflight2000.org
National Air and Space Museum:
http://www.nasm.edu/