Pilots

"Two roads diverged in a yellow wood. And sorry I could not travel both, and be one traveler."

Robert Frost's lines embody the agonizings of all young people considering a career in aviation. Could this possibly be the right road to follow? The more well-trodden path leads to known destinations — security, predictability. This grassier way wanders off into a tantalizing shade of trees. The decision requires a wrenching self-searching. What is important? How much can be risked? What obligations must be fulfilled? There is no taking advice or example from others. One student's success can be another's debacle.

Still, the voice of experience can lend inspiration. Listen to Debra Plymate's story. Born into a flying family, Debra was preordained to be a pilot. Debra's father, a Navy air traffic controller and private pilot, delivered announcements of her birth by dive bombing baby photos into relatives' yards. (He missed. Grandpa had to shinny up a tree to retrieve them.) At the age of seven, she watched her mother solo; later, she saw both brothers become pilots.

Debra attended school before the age of ab initio training, where a groundling can walk into one door and strut out the other with stripes on his sleeves. Enrolling in the College of the Redwoods in Eureka, California, she made no commitment to a particular field of study, other than taking the private pilot ground school. The campus flying club offered, as a scholarship, a membership including flight training, which Debra won.

Emerging in 1974 with an associate degree and uncertain where to head next, Debra took the Federal Aviation Administration's air traffic control entrance examination. While waiting to move up on the two-year waiting list, she tried her hand at a number of jobs — working on an assembly line that produced airline meals, waitressing at the airport cocktail lounge, and performing every possible function from taking dictation to changing engine oil at Oakland (California) Aviation. Her aim was to be near airplanes.

During this period, her father was employed as the Bechtel Corporation's project manager in charge of revamping the Amman, Jordan, International Airport, and seized for his daughter a once-in-a-lifetime opening. The Jordanian Royal Air Academy, a government-connected aeronautical college and flight training facility, was being expanded and needed someone with Debra's background to assist the planning team. The trip included, as a bonus, co-piloting a new Learjet from Wichita to Amman and, once there, the chance for frequent flitting about the kingdom in a Piper Cherokee.

Opportunity, they say, knocks once; but that's not true. Often, it knocks twice, but simultaneously on two separate doors. As she was packing her bags, Debra's number came up on the FAA hiring register, with an offer as an air traffic control specialist at the Honolulu Air Route Traffic Control Center. The turmoil continued through several days of calculated soul-searching; then, practicality won out. Daydreams of being swept away on an Arabian stallion by an Omar Sharif look-alike were bulldozed aside by the realization that the FAA offered a highly respected, highly technical, highly paid career with the prospect of security and advancement. Of course, Honolulu's not a bad place to start, either.

Debra became a controller at Honolulu ARTCC, and later at the air traffic facility on the island of Maui. That position required a daily lightplane commute across a hundred miles of interisland ocean. She moved through a series of FAA assignments, leading to a staff position at the national headquarters in Washington, D.C. Then, wanting to return to more direct contact with airplanes (and the folks who fly them), Debra moved to the Leesburg (Virginia) Flight Service Station just west of the Capitol.

Along the way, she picked up a bachelor of science degree in aeronautics and additional pilot ratings. She also acquired a husband who flies Metroliners for the Army, Learjets for the FAA, and serves as A&P for the couple's two and a half airplanes — a Cessna Centurion, which recently took them coast-to-coast; a Cessna Skylane; and a Heath Parasol, a pre-World War I homebuilt based on original plans, which, for want of time, may never progress beyond its present Heap-of-Parasol parts stage. In the meantime, she mothers two toddlers who already get starry-eyed at the sight of wings, participates in several women's pilot and controller organizations, and writes for a number of magazines. Nobody can say that Debra Plymate did not make a successful choice.

And yet...does she ever wonder how things might have developed had she turned the other way? It's hard to keep fantasies in check because, unlike most of us, Debra is privileged to have a glimpse down the road not taken. After she passed up the job in Amman, Najeeb Halaby, one-time FAA administrator and erstwhile international aviation consultant, helped slide his daughter into the slot. Since King Hussein kept personal tabs on his air industry, Lisa Halaby met him, married him, and became Jordan's Queen Noor.