Sheri Coin Marshall has just one arm and captains a commercial cargo airplane.
Clyde Smith, a deaf pilot, broke the language barrier to earn his pilot certificate and went on to found the International Deaf Pilots Association.
Dan Buchanan, a wheelchair user, pilots a hang glider in airshows around the world.
Mike Penketh, a former American Airlines pilot who lost both hands, regained his pilot certification and is one of the world's top aerobatic pilots.
And Richard Logan, after losing the use of his legs, was the first pilot in the world to earn certification from student pilot to CFII using a hand control.
What was once impossible is now just another chapter in the history of aviation. Every disabled pilot owes a lot to these trailblazers.
Sheri Coin Marshall
When Sheri Coin Marshall was three years old, she and a friend decided to play house. While Marshall stuffed a bulky bedspread into the family washing machine, her friend grabbed the control dial, twisting the knob past the wash setting directly to the spin cycle. The year was 1957, and many safety features now so common in household appliances were not yet required. Caught in the fabric, Marshall's arm and bedspread wove into a taut braid whipped by the spinning agitator. Less than a minute later, her right arm hung by a thread of tattered skin. Medskin. Medical technology of the day saved her life, but not her arm.
Left-handers have long said that it's a challenge to live in a right-handed world. It's tougher still for a one-hander to manage in a two-handed world. The unremarkable presents barriers at every turn. "How do you handle a buffet line?" Marshall offers by way of example, and an autobiographical account, titled One Can Do It, details the adjustments she has made - from learning to tie her shoes to learning how to fly an airplane. None of which, she says with a shrug, "was difficult."
Today, Marshall captains a Cessna 208 Caravan for Mountain Air Cargo, a Federal Express feeder airline, and she recently became a Caravan check airman and training captain for the company. In proving that "one" can in fact do it, the 3,500-hour pilot has cut huge swaths in the sky - not only for herself, but also for others who face physical challenges. Marshall is passionate about flying and adamant about helping others to climb into the cockpit. "I feel if I would have had one word of encouragement," she said, "I would have been flying and contributing a lot sooner."
As a teenager, Marshall looked into flying, asking about lessons at Fullerton Airport in California, and was turned down flat. She'd need two hands, she was told, "one on the yoke, the other on the throttle." She didn't give flying much more thought until 10 years later when a friend in Warden, Washington, gave her an airplane ride. Marshall's dormant yearnings to fly were reawakened.
"Can I learn to fly?" she asked the chief pilot at Felt's Field Aviation in Spokane.
"We don't know," he said. "We've never had anyone like you."
Marshall met with a safety inspector at the local FAA flight standards district office (FSDO). "Go fly," he told her.
"I needed something to hold onto the yoke" Marshall said after the second flight lesson. "Something to push, pull, and hold the yoke steady." A length of sprinkler pipe and a prosthetic hand that she named "Handy" saw her through. She doesn't wear it now, she said, and is not restricted to using it. Flying from the right seat, Marshall obtained her private pilot certificate in just seven months.
Marshall began teaching in 1986 and was the chief flight instructor of a Part 141 flight school in Louisville, Kentucky. Marshall continues to teach and is a ready consultant to students who have physical impairments that divert them from customary flight instruction. She was appointed as an FAA aviation safety counselor in 1992.
For her dedication to fellow pilots and the aviation industry, Marshall, who lives in Benton, Kentucky, has received many awards. In 1995, she was recognized by both The Ninety-Nines and Zonta International, a service organization of business people and professionals working to advance the status of women, for her contributions to aviation. She was also named the 1998 FAA Flight Instructor of the Year for the FAA's Southern Region. On October 1, Marshall will be inducted into the Kentucky Aviation Hall of Fame at the Aviation Museum of Kentucky in Lexington.
And Marshall continues to press the limits. "How much further can I go?" she asks. "I have to be doing something special. It's just my nature." She adds thoughtfully, "Who knows how many people I'm going to touch?"
"I fly for a living," Marshall says matter-of-factly. "It's what I do."
Clyde Smith
Clyde Smith, a 500-hour pilot who resides in Jacksonville, Illinois, is breaking the sound barrier. Genetically deaf, Smith had always wanted to fly. With encouragement from his good friend Jack Kelsey, another deaf pilot, Smith took his first ground-school class at Jacksonville Airport on his fiftieth birthday.
Jacksonville is home to the Illinois School for the Deaf, where Smith, who holds a master's degree in educational administration, is a teacher. It is a tightly knit community, and Smith's flight instructor, Don Allen, was familiar with deafness. This familiarity was beneficial in Smith's quest for a pilot certificate, because his ability was never in question. There also was no problem in passing his medical. Not all deaf pilots share this same experience.
"Misconceptions about deafness have been a hard thing to overcome," Smith explained. "There was an FAA examiner who refused a deaf student pilot at 50 hours, saying that the student needed at least 75 hours before he could test," he said. "I don't know if he would have said the same thing to a hearing student.
"Another man in Virginia landed for gas, and the attendant disappeared. Then the police showed up. They asked him if he'd stolen the airplane, saying 'You're deaf; you can't fly.'
"Most people are surprised that there are deaf pilots," Smith continued, "and don't know that the first person to make a cross-country flight from east to west was Cal Rogers in 1911, who was deaf."
Smith does not discount the fact that the process is difficult for deaf student pilots, adding that the average time to get a certificate is about 80 to 90 hours. "And there is that language barrier," he said.
Smith is founding president of the International Deaf Pilots Association (IDPA), which was established in 1994 after he and Kelsey met with the FAA in Washington, D.C. "I wanted to start an organization to protect our rights," Smith explained. And after getting the names of nearly 100 deaf pilots - a surprising number, he said - "we started writing letters."
The first IDPA fly-in was a three-day event held in Knoxville, Tennessee. There were 13 airplanes and 100 people, including a deaf pilot from France who held a U.S. private pilot certificate. "He's the reason we changed our original name to International Deaf Pilots Association," Smith said. IDPA is now 235 members strong, with 175 from the United States.
Smith says the IDPA has goals that include a plan for two deaf pilots to circumnavigate the globe - a journey that would draw worldwide attention to their cause.
"I'd also like to see a program implemented wherein deaf pilots could obtain IFR certification," he said, "possibly using a device similar in size to a GPS, something with a screen and TTY communication with the tower - visual instead of audio."
While huge strides have been made, the IDPA is urging more opportunities for deaf pilots in commercial aviation. "There are now two deaf CFIs in the United States, and I know of one deaf jet pilot," Smith said. "And there is also a young deaf pilot who, with his deaf female partner, owns two FBOs and an aviation dealership - the first FBO enterprise ever operated by deaf pilots.
"But I also know a man who wants to be a crop duster," Smith said. "He has the license, the certification, but he can't get work. Nobody will hire him."
Dan Buchanan
The only hang glider in North America with an FAA airworthiness certificate belongs to Dan Buchanan, who takes the Australian Moyes Sonic all over the world, performing in one dazzling airshow after another.
Like a parasail pulled behind a powerboat, Buchanan launches his performance from behind a tow vehicle driving 30 mph down the runway. The hang glider is fastened to a winch with a 3,000-foot line, which is mounted on the tow vehicle. When Buchanan reaches 1,500 feet, he cuts himself loose.
The hang glider is equipped with a pyrotechnic rainbow of special effects. While Buchanan narrates from the sky, coiling trails of multicolored smoke follow the aerobatic glider. And as the smoke fades into wispy plumes, Buchanan fires brilliant flashes of color. Sweeping 200-foot wingtip streamers add to the soaring display.
During Buchanan's climb to altitude, an aerobatic airplane appears and a mock battle begins. All eyes are riveted skyward as the airplane begins to "attack" Buchanan, making close passes, chopping off the trailing streamers with its propeller and wings. In a spray of gibes blasted over the public-address system, the crowd is privy to a staged banter between the airborne pilots.
Buchanan's captivating performance concludes with a controlled ground loop near the show line. Most people in the airshow crowds are unaware that Buchanan is a paraplegic - until his wheelchair is delivered to the landing field via police car or helicopter.
A longtime hang glider and commercial pilot, Buchanan broke his back while landing his hang glider in a storm. Six months later, with little adjustment, he was back in the air. Soon after, he became an international performer. "I saw the potential," Buchanan said. He will perform in more than 100 shows this year alone.
The only modification made to Buchanan's hang glider was the addition of wheels, since he could no longer use his feet on landing. Beyond that, it was business as usual. "You maneuver a hang glider by shifting your weight," explained Buchanan, whose refined upper-body strength enables him to soar with ease.
The 70-pound Moyes Sonic, with its 32-foot wingspan, is capable of attaining speeds up to 70 mph and loads of plus 6 and minus 3 Gs. "You can ride the thermals for hours at a time," he said.
On the show circuit for nearly a decade, Buchanan continues to seek out new ways to delight onlookers. "It's doing what I like to do," he smiled. "The show is always evolving. If I didn't keep looking for new ways to dazzle the crowd, I'd get bored and the show would get stale."
Mike Penketh
As McDonnell Douglas MD-80 pilot Mike Penketh lay in a hospital bed, recovering from a crash on the Bonneville Salt Flats in Utah - where the Lakester he was racing at 300 mph flipped countless times - a doctor told him that he'd never drive again. The accident sheared off one of his hands and damaged the other so badly that it required amputation. Penketh was puzzled.
"I asked her how she expected me to get to the airport," he said. When Penketh eventually met up with the Department of Motor Vehicles, he'd been practicing his driving in a five-speed Corvette. Retesting for his license, he passed with ease. The examiner couldn't hide his surprise. "You did a good job," he said.
"I know," Penketh responded. "Did you think I came here to fail?"
From the moment of impact on that long stretch of salt flat, Penketh has rebuilt his life. Three hundred miles an hour, he says, "is the speed at which life changes." He has had to relearn thousands of routine tasks.
After the accident, Penketh's insurance company fit him with hooks, which are held in place by a harness that fits over his back and shoulders. They're heavy and awkward, and they offer limited movement.
"I wanted myoelectric hands," Penketh said. "You need the best tool for the job. They look more lifelike and have a superior gripping ability." A former Marine Corps pilot, Penketh soloed in high school, had his ATP at age 21, flew fire bombers for Hemet Flying Service, and piloted aircraft in South America for the Honduran air force before becoming a captain for American Airlines. Accustomed to challenge, and accustomed to satisfaction, Penketh got his hands.
"There were gears and wires and electrodes," he said. "I felt like the bionic man." A combination of conscious thought and flexing of the muscles in his upper forearm causes Penketh's wrists to rotate and his hands to grip. "It only took me about two minutes to get it down," he said.
The next challenge was the FAA. "Three times I tried for my medical, and three times they turned me down with no explanation," Penketh said. "They just said, no." With a shrug of his shoulders, he admits that he can't accept the word no.
Enter specialist Dr. Henry Rowe, who spent nearly two years educating the FAA on what could be accomplished using myoelectric prosthetics. "The FAA had a lot of questions," Penketh said. "They were curious if high altitudes would affect the myo hands. I had to go to Oklahoma and spend time in the FAA's high-altitude simulation chamber. The hands didn't explode. They worked just as they were designed."
After a lengthy arm wrestle, Penketh went to Sacramento and was recertified by the FAA. All of his ratings and certificates were reinstated. To date, Penketh is the only pilot in the world to be certified with two myoelectric hands.
Like the DMV examiner, the FAA examiner could not hide his surprise at Penketh's astounding ability.
Although Penketh, a 20,000-hour pilot, thought about returning to his captain's seat at American Airlines, he is heading in other directions. A longtime and winning competitor in the Reno Air Races, Penketh is also one of the world's finest aerobatic pilots. Winning one contest after another in his Zlin 50, he has supervised the building of an Akrotech Giles 202, a sleek and powerful aerobatic plane that cruises at 200 mph and can withstand plus or minus 10 Gs. It has a roll rate in excess of 400 degrees per second.
At EAA AirVenture in Oshkosh, he won a Lindbergh Championship Award for the best kitbuilt airplane.
"You've got to take what you have and run with it," he said. "No sense in moping. It might take a little longer, but if you want to do it bad enough, you've got to keep marching."
Richard Logan
In 1968, Richard Logan was a U.S. Marine fighting in the jungles of Vietnam. Wounded in battle, a spinal cord injury put him in a wheelchair. This one-time prelaw student earned a doctoral degree in Slavic languages and literatures and settled into a career teaching college. A single flight in a Cessna 172 changed the course of his life.
A neighbor of Logan's, an air traffic controller, had just bought a 172 and asked Logan if he wanted to go up for a ride. "After that ride," Logan said, "I bought in for 50 percent of the plane." When controllers went on strike in 1980, he bought the whole airplane.
Knowing that there were wheelchair users who were also pilots, Logan did some research and found that his key to the cockpit was a handy bit of apparatus created by Leroy Laneve of Union Aviation in Sturgis, Kentucky. The sky opened up to wheelchair aviators when the same hand-control concept that had long been in place for automobiles was applied to airplanes. Laneve called his innovative device the Union Hand Control, and it was specifically designed to control the Cessna's rudder.
Logan would become the first person in the world to earn complete certification, from student through commercial pilot and instrument flight instructor, using the hand control.
With partner Mindy Desens, Logan opened Lucky Mindy Aviation, a flight school and air taxi service. But the FAA was not nearly as thrilled about this venture as was the fledgling businessman. Getting the ratings was one thing; operating a business was another. "They didn't like the idea at all," Logan said. "I had people tell me to my face that it was their goal to stop me."
Desens was an ever-present ally. Another supporter was wheelchair aviator Mike Smith, owner of Aero Haven Inc., a California-based charter service and flight school (See " Pilots: Mike Smith," February Pilot). But Logan said his FSDO refused to talk to the Riverside FSDO where Smith had made so much headway. "One problem the FAA obsessed on was my ability to visually inspect the fuel inside the wing," Logan recalled. The issue ricocheted from Washington, D.C., to Oklahoma City, before it was ultimately resolved.
Eventually, Logan was in business, and it grew rapidly - but he later dissolved the charter operation and disbanded the staff. His students simply took priority. Only recently did Logan retire and sell Lucky Mindy Aviation in Winsted, Minnesota. Teaching both able-bodied and disabled students, he saw many who had been scarred by the system. "A woman came in one day and told me, in halting speech, about her last instructor. She was worn out, ill-treated by the process of getting a license, and was finally ready, after several years, to try it again."
Instructors are not the only problem, Logan says. "I heard an examiner say, 'If I don't make the women cry on their checkride, I'm not doing my job.' We never sent anyone to him again. That kind of thing is not necessary. It just feeds the egos of sadistic people."
In addition to his own students, Logan worked with other wheelchair-bound pilots and their instructors on the mechanics of hand-controlled flight. He also offered valuable firsthand information to these pilots whose first order of business is to pass the physical. "Doctors routinely prescribe things like muscle relaxants for people in chairs," he said. "Then they think they need it, and then they're addicted, and they can't fly. You also need to stay lean and mean; watch your diet and stay healthy. You need to be a bit of an athlete climbing in and out of a plane."
Though every battle for Logan has turned out well, it has been a struggle at every turn. "But I hope it's cleared obstacles for others," he said. "It is a privilege and an honor and a duty to teach my students. I would do nothing to wipe the smiles off their faces."
With so many innovations in aviation technology and expertise, there appears to be a shift in the burden of proof for disabled pilots. The emphasis seems less on proving that they can fly than in proving that they can't.
Every time a disabled pilot slides into the cockpit, he or she is taking a flight of discovery, says Sheri Coin Marshall. "Every new pilot means new blood to the aviation industry. Everyone from the bank to the landing strip gets a piece of the action. We need to be more liberal in those flights of discovery. There needs to be an open invitation to those willing to try. It's not for anyone to say what someone cannot do."
Links to additional information on flying with physical disabilities can be found on AOPA Online ( www.aopa.org/pilot/links/links9910.shtml). Kresse Armour is editor of the Grizzly Newspaper in Big Bear, California. She has held a pilot certificate since March 1996.
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