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![Molly Peebles [Photograph by Gail Hanusa]](../images/people/molly.jpg) From One
Woman’s Dream: The Flight Across America
By Corinne Hollister
Photograph by Gail Hanusa
To Molly Peebles, flying is all about breaking away from self-imposed limits.
It’s about facing fear and moving beyond it. To Peebles, a 34-year-old Redmond
resident, flying is an opportunity for healing.
And that’s what inspired her to take on a monumental task — organizing a
national event involving 15,000 airports and at least as many pilots to
commemorate the events of September 11, with only a few months to make it
happen.
With the Flight Across America, Peebles hopes to boost aviation, stir up
stories from individual pilots and change the way all of us look at the sky.
Beginning August 11, pilots on the West Coast will kick off the first leg of a
journey across the country. Peebles’ intent is to have at least one plane take
off and land from every public airport in the nation, weaving a web of flights
to build a national community and celebrate aviation.
“Aviation was the tool that brought about the horrific events of September
11,” Peebles says. “Why not create a unifying event and have aviation again as
the tool to make it happen?”
Peebles’ vision has roots in her own dream to fly and in her passion for
people. With a professional background shaped by seminary studies in Illinois,
Peebles dedicated herself to social service, including work with drug and
alcohol patients and the homeless. A recently divorced mother of three, last
spring Peebles stopped at Paine Field because she thought an airplane ride would
lift her spirits. She was in the midst of reorganizing her life.
The woman behind the counter told Peebles no one was available for a flight,
then handed her a packet of information on learning to fly. Peebles’ hadn’t
considered becoming a pilot before then. “I heard myself say, ‘Yeah, sure,’
without really thinking about it,” she recalls. “It never occurred to me to be a
pilot.”
Peebles went at flying full force. After completing ground school last May,
she was up in the sky two and three times per week, if the weather cooperated.
The process presented numerous opportunities to face fear and move through it,
she says, including the challenge of slow flight, just above stall speed, and
then moving on to practice a full stall. With those accomplishments and the
experience of flight itself, Peebles’ own boundaries began to fall away.
“Aviation is filled with people who had a vision of the impossible and worked
to make it possible,” she explains. “Flying in and of itself is an outrageous
act. The inherent nature of aviation is that it defies the impossible.”
Peebles’ final check flight was originally scheduled for September 11. In the
months since then, she received her pilots license, created a marketing job for
herself at Regal Air, where she completed instruction, bought a house, faced her
father’s death and initiated the Flight Across America project.
Barbara Tolbert says Peebles’ idea offers a wonderful public relations
opportunity to pilots and to aviation in general. Tolbert serves as executive
director of the Northwest Experimental Aircraft Association (EAA) —
organizers of the Arlington
Fly-In, the third largest recreational aviation event in the country. “I
think pilots look for any opportunity to fly and would jump at the chance to
participate in an event with national significance,” she says.
Peebles is now nurturing a partnership with the
Museum of Flight, which might host the
project and handle all donations. One of the museum’s vintage aircraft may be
the first to take off on the Flight Across America at Paine Field. Pilots around
the country can sign up to participate at the project’s Web site,
www.flightacrossamerica.com.
In addition to the Northwest EAA, Peebles has enlisted the support of the
Washington Pilot’s Association, the local arm
of the Federal Aviation
Administration, Women in Aviation, and the
Ninety-Nines — an aviation group formed by
the first 99 female pilots, including Amelia Earhart. Peebles even sent
President Bush a request asking him to participate with Air Force One on the
last flight of the journey into New York on September 11, 2002. Anything is
possible, she says, including healing a nation and rejuvenating an industry with
a national event celebrating the freedom of flight.
“What is coming out of me now is erasing my own limitations. I am capable of
being responsible, in owning myself and finding myself capable,” Peebles says.
“The Flight Across America is my own personal example of what’s possible.”
Photograph by Elizabeth Armstrong/The Herald
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