Diane Earhart: Boldly Going Where No Private Pilot Has Gone Before
Earhart had been deeply in love with aviation since childhood. She got her private pilot license at 17 — the youngest the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) allows — and after six years as a secretary, found work as an air traffic controller and flight instructor in St. Louis.
Then came the MS diagnosis, in June of 1995. The FAA took her wings off.
“I had a fight to maintain my medical certification,” she recalled. While her neurologist put her on a disease-modifying drug, Earhart launched a novel p.r. campaign, sending the FAA a video of herself dancing, cycling, even sorting laundry.
Not only did the feds let her go back to work, they later wrote to thank her for sticking up for aviators with medical conditions.
“There are several pilots now with MS. Now it’s basically a non-event, and that’s because I blazed the path 13 years ago. It was a big deal then,” Earhart said. The only give-back: she has to get medical recertifications every six months, twice as often as her peers.
In addition to participating in self-help groups and Walk MS through the Gateway Area Chapter, Earhart has continued moving her life forward — or should we say, upward. Recently she and Gary Streeter, a flight instructor and bona fide rocket scientist, founded the nonprofit General Aviation Space Group, with the aim of showing that outer space belongs to everyone and no one.
They’re designing a single-stage rocket called Aurora that’s scheduled to launch to 5,000 feet in October 2008. Their next step will be a three-stage rocket that will lift a satellite named Astra into low Earth orbit (about 200 miles up) and beam a telemetry signal back. The rocket carrying Astra will be named Spirit of St. Louis — The Next Century.
In 1927, Earhart said, another pilot went knocking on doors asking St. Louis businessmen to support his venture. She hopes businesses will be as generous with General Aviation Space Group, which is being incorporated as a nonprofit, as they were with Charles Lindbergh.
Another inspiration for Diane is the pioneering aviatrix Amelia Earhart and Diane adopted the name Earhart in 1991, after a divorce, as a way of reasserting her found identity.
The fact that words matter can also be seen in the nonprofit’s choice of name — “general aviation.” To pilots, those words mean pure freedom: the right to fly whenever you want, wherever you want, in sky that isn’t reserved for commercial or military use. Earhart and Streeter just want to extend the concept up.
“There’s Dick Rutan and Richard Branson doing commercial space travel, and that’s fine,” Earhart said.
“Just the same way that now we’ve got United and Northwest airlines but we’ve also got Pipers and Cessnas in the air, we’ve got Dick and Richard in space but there’s also room for Diane and Gary in space. There’s room for everyone.”
Earhart, who recently remarried, sees a great future for humans in space, with families “a generation or three” from now hopping into private spacecraft to visit relatives on the Moon. Until we get there, space exploration offers abundant opportunities for today’s students, she said.
“The kids who are now in middle school, by the time they’re out of college, they’re going to be the workforce for careers that don’t even exist yet. Some of the information that we find out might help shape some of those careers,” Earhart said.
“I look back on myself in high school, and I wonder, why did I not drink and smoke and do drugs and get pregnant at 14? It’s because I had so much to do. I have long held the belief that if you don’t want kids hanging around on the street corner, you have to give them something better to do than hanging around on the street corner, and space might be it for some of them.”
Learn more about Diane Earhart and the General Aviation Space Group.