Daedalus warned his son Icarus not to fly too high, or the sun would melt his waxen wings. But the boy, intoxicated with flight, soared above his cautious father. In the clear blue sky, the warmth of the sun dissolved his delicate wings, causing him to plunge to his death in the green sea below. The myth of Icarus is used to illustrate the ancient Greek word hubris, a term for the overweening human pride and vanity that often result in tragedy. Jessica Dubroff’s wings may have been frosted with ice, and she had no joy of flight on her last ride. She took off in a cold rain and died when her single-engine Cessna 177B nose-dived onto the black tar of a suburban roadway. But her senseless death last week could also be attributed to a modern kind of hubris. For Jessica was urged on by overzealous parents, by a media drawn to a natural human-interest story and by a willfully blind Federal Aviation Administration, which permitted a 4-ft. 2-in., 55-lb. seven-year-old whose feet did not reach the rudder pedals to fly an airplane across the country in a misbegotten publicity stunt–as long as a licensed pilot was beside her. At week’s end a federal investigator suggested that Jessica’s Cessna was overloaded for the thin Rocky Mountain air and wind shear may have induced the flight instructor to take over the controls in the plane’s last few moments. The brief flight and violent fall of Jessica, her father Lloyd and flight instructor Joe Reid was seized upon and transformed into a kind of modern morality tale of parents looking for meaning and morning shows searching for novelty. On talk radio and in coffee shops, her soaring spirit and tragic plunge were the subjects of outrage and debate. Overnight she became the poster child of parental and media exploitation, of an ethos that granted children too much freedom rather than too little, of a parental drive not content to let children be children. Many wondered whether the freedom to pursue personal identity had been pushed too far. Reared by separated parents whose fuzzy New Age philosophy was that children should follow their bliss, Jessica was encouraged to pursue an adult ambition that ill fitted her. After her death so many of the bright words that preceded the trip take on a grimly poetic quality. Her father, in Cheyenne after the first leg: “This started off as a father-daughter adventure, and it’s gotten wonderfully out of hand.” Jessica, to the Times of London: “I’m going to fly till I die.” Her father: “I think I finally got my job description in order as a parent. I used to think being a parent meant teaching things. Now I feel my job is to help them learn by exposing them to new experience.” The hype of the whole enterprise, in retrospect, seems reckless. Let us tick off the deceptions that everyone involved pretended were true: the trip was Jessica’s idea; she was doing it for the joy of flying; she was truly piloting the plane; it was safe; she wasn’t scared. For the most part, the public played along with this game, for it is easier not to question the received platitudes. Yet, looking at her taped interviews after the fact, it is clear that the dutiful little girl who didn’t want to disappoint her father, who insisted, “I fly for joy,” looked anything but joyful.
