Of course no one could have guessed what the future would hold for Marta on that sunny afternoon in Long Island. Marta certainly didn't know at the time that she would help expand horizons for women pursuing careers in aviation. In fact, she didn't even know that she wanted to fly airplanes. She describes herself as a kid with no real focus - a lot of energy and intelligence but nothing to apply it to. So just how did that energetic kid become an aerospace engineer, commercial pilot, CFI, A, world-class aerobatic pilot, and crew member in such aircraft as the F-111, F-14, F-16, F-18, and the Blackbird?
Well, there are no fairy godmothers in this story, but Marta did have some advantages, starting with her parents. Both were individualists who taught their children - boys and girls alike - that they could become whomever they wanted provided they gave their best to everything they did. Marta and her siblings were raised on self-determination and pride in their own accomplishments. Discipline and accountability were implicit. But so was encouragement, like the watch Marta's parents gave her engraved with the inscription "CAVU."
Everybody had responsibilities both to the family and to improving themselves. Though not a bookworm, Marta liked learning, and she was a good student. She loved machinery and was intrigued by activity, and she describes herself as a tactile-kinesthetic learner. Like her mother and aerospace engineer father, she was intrigued by the technical side of things. She was always thinking in terms of building, whether it was learning how to "build" clothing from her mother or helping her pop build boats. (I suppose any 19-year-old who spends Christmas vacation rebuilding the engine of her 1967 Ford Falcon could be said to have a technical turn of mind.)
In keeping with the family ideal of constant self-improvement, Marta was told she needed a hobby. She picked two things that she had never tried but sounded interesting - horseback riding and flying. Since her father worked with people who had airplanes, airplanes won. Her pop arranged her first airplane ride, and she enjoyed it so much that her parents followed up with a Christmas present of 10 hours of flight training when she was 14 years old. She soloed a Cherokee 140 on her sixteenth birthday, passed her private pilot checkride on her seventeenth, and earned her commercial ticket on her eighteenth. By this time, flying was more than a hobby. It was the thing that "made me me," Marta says.
By the time Marta was in high school, she knew that she wanted to be a test pilot. At that time, however, the military was the only avenue for test pilot school, and the prospects for a woman becoming an aviator - especially a test pilot - were bleak. So Marta took a reality check, did some goal-setting, and decided that she could become an aeronautical engineer and at least work with test pilots. By the time she was 19, Marta was a sophomore at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute in Troy, New York, and a co-op student with NASA/Langley - a position that lasted three years. After graduating with a degree in aeronautical engineering in 1979, she joined NASA's Dryden Flight Research facility at Edwards Air Force Base in California, where she's been working ever since.
Today Marta - a much-requested speaker at schools, forums, workshops, and symposia - offers some advice for succeeding in any endeavor. If you want to get where you're going, start by knowing who you are and what you like to do, she says. Get involved with whatever it is you enjoy. Practice. Get good at it. (If it's something you have passion for, you'll want to anyway.) Get a good education. Use your hobbies to help determine your areas of interest, and think about whether you can make your hobbies into a career. Share your enthusiasm, walk through that door when opportunity knocks, and leave a good impression.
Young people who get out and get involved may find themselves with the next best thing to a fairy godmother - a mentor. Marta had her first mentor while she was still a child. When her pop mentioned Marta's enthusiasm for flying to coworker Don Evans, Evans took her under his wing.
One of the opportunities Marta sought - and was lucky enough to get - was her three-year stint as a co-op student with NASA/Langley. The program marked the first time she was really on her own. She had to be responsible for showing up in the right place at the right time and doing what she was directed to do. In return for being responsible, she was given a chance to have unique experiences while learning and making mistakes in a forum where nobody got hurt. It was a time of inspiration, encouragement, and professional growth. She had the chance to "touch airplanes," work with adults who were not her parents' friends, be treated like an adult as part of an engineering team, and make adult-type decisions - an exciting time for a college student.
Marta often sums up the formula for success as her four "rights": the right time, the right place, the right qualifications, and the right enthusiasm. And Marta's philosophy is that once you get where you're going, you'll have a new responsibility, which is your legacy to leave behind. It will then be your turn to give back to the next person, perhaps the one with that sparkle, what you received from those before you. One of the reasons Marta spends so much time talking at schools and at forums is to kindle that spark for the kid who really likes something, but who needs validation, to know that, "Yes, I really might be able to make a career in this field."
Marta has made a career for herself in a field often considered inhospitable to women. She's won scientific awards and service medals; authored technical publications on laminar flow experiments, sailplane performance, and composite construction; and garnered over 7,000 flight hours, many hundreds of them in high performance turbojets.
Shortly after she joined NASA Dryden in 1979, Marta found herself flying in F-104s at altitudes of up to 85,000 feet doing zero-G experiments and evaluating tile adhesives for the space shuttle. In 1982, she began several years of flying F-111s, F-14s, and the highly modified F-16XL for laminar flow research. In 1990, she became project manager of the Laminar Flow Research Project. Her team successfully demonstrated, for the first time, extensive laminar flow on delta-winged aircraft under supersonic conditions. In 1990, when the Air Force decided to decommission the Blackbird, Marta was part of NASA/USAF team created to determine what would be needed for NASA Dryden to establish a flight research capability using the Blackbird. The resulting expertise combined with her experience in high-altitude flying and flight test experiment integration made her a natural choice for one of two SR-71 flight engineer slots that opened in October 1991.
Marta regards it as an honor to be one of only about 400 people who have had the privilege to fly the Blackbird - not to mention that she is the first Blackbird crewmember to have, as she puts it, the unique characteristic of being female. (Beverly Byron, former Maryland congresswoman and then-senior member of the House Armed Services Committee, was the first female to ride in the Blackbird.) Marta says that the first time she flew the Blackbird was the most fun she ever had in her life, the hardest she had ever worked in her life, and the most successful she ever felt. Since then, NASA has used the airplane for sonic boom mitigation studies, for carrying a scale model of the X-33 linear aerospike engine, for studying the ozone layer over the United States, and as a surrogate satellite for Iridium.
Flying the SR-71, Marta says, is a complex mix of physical and intellectual challenge - the very thing that she likes best about flying in general. Traveling at a speed of more than 30 miles per minute requires 100 percent involvement if you hope to stay ahead of the airplane. The Blackbird may have been ahead of its time aerodynamically, but there isn't much help from microprocessors to keep the needle threaded at Mach 3, and the cockpit is pretty much 1960s steam gauges. According to lore, the Blackbird knows when you're not thinking about it - and does something to get your attention back. Of course, it's easy to become distracted. The view is grand, you can see forever, and the sky is a fade-to-black cerulean blue. At night from 85,000 feet you can see Los Angeles from Phoenix, Arizona, 400 miles away. Of course, you don't have time for things like that. When you take a moment to admire the view, that's when the airplane "burps," a light goes on, and you fight panic as you wonder what you missed. Marta is too busy working experiments and navigating to enjoy the view.
Another unique aspect of Marta's work is that her husband, Bob Meyer, is the director of research engineering at NASA and has also flown the SR-71. In their personal lives, both Marta and Bob fly several different high-performance aircraft, as well as participating in competition aerobatics, for which Marta practices at least three to four hours every week. Marta represented the United States in competition at the top "unlimited" level in France just last year, and Bob was on the U.S. National aerobatic team in 1994. The two also hold competition-style aerobatics training camps several times a year near their Southern California home.
Sharing an avocation is one thing. Sharing a career is something else. While the private sector might raise an eyebrow at husband and wife director-level managers working at the same firm, Marta and Bob have made it a success. Expertise in different areas, as well as the fact that neither will ever serve as the other's boss, has helped keep them apart at the office. Upper management at NASA has been supportive of the husband and wife duo and, on a personal level, they have agreed not to discuss work at home. "We can talk about work all the way home, but when we open the car doors in the garage, work's over," Marta said.
What can possibly top flying the SR-71? Honor though it is to fly that supersonic bird, Marta says that aerobatics is her greatest love. And you might think that the zenith of an aerospace career would be a rocket ride into orbit. But that isn't the work Marta wants to do. She considered applying to the astronaut corps but decided not to. She just wants to fly airplanes.
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