Jessica's Last Flight: Another Idea That Didn't Work -- Child Pilot's Dad Known For His Grandiose Plans

SAN JOSE, CALIF. - He inhaled each breath with enthusiasm.

He had loads of ideas - wild, on the edge, out there. But he so believed in them that others did as well, to the point of calling him a genius.

"Thomas Edison had crazy ideas, too," said one man who loaned him - and lost - money.

But Lloyd Dubroff often failed to pull them off, including his last big idea: having his 7-year-old daughter fly an airplane across the country.

Since the April 11 crash that killed Jessica and Lloyd Dubroff and flight instructor Joe Reid, the scrutiny has fallen mostly on Lisa Blair Hathaway, Jessica's unconventional, New Age mother who talked about "being" and her daughter dying in joy. In fact, the flight was more in keeping with Jessica's seemingly conservative, business-consultant father, who came up with the idea.

Dubroff was the charismatic salesman whose fortune was always just around the corner. He and Hathaway shared positive thinking and metaphysical pursuits. They were more interested in life's possibilities than in its limitations. Yet life's limitations always seemed to catch up: debts, bankruptcies, evictions and lawsuits.

Still, he dreamed big. But when flying lessons for Jessica quickly grew into a record-setting, father-daughter adventure, the big idea hit the laws of aerodynamics, and gravity took over.

Compared with other child pilots whose records she sought to break, Jessica was the least prepared for a flight schedule that was the most grueling, though investigators don't consider that a cause in the crash. Dubroff and Reid may have overloaded the plane. And the media flood had gotten so out of hand that Reid, a calm and capable pilot, confided that he felt overwhelmed.

Friends aren't surprised

Some who knew Lloyd Dubroff say they aren't surprised.

"That was his life in a nutshell," said Cleon Arnold, Dubroff's former landlord who is still owed rent plus money he loaned Dubroff to start a company. "Great idea. But it didn't work."

Dubroff loved people, and they loved him - even most of his creditors. He was smart and infectious in his visionary thinking. Self-taught and hard-working, he had a knack for helping people define and go after their goals.

But in some ways he wasn't rooted in reality. He was the man with an incredible head for figures who had trouble paying his rent. He created seminars on "getting what you want when you want it," yet until the very end never figured out how to do it for himself.

For most of his 57 years, Dubroff joked that he was blessed - or cursed - with a lot of potential. "I think he was always trying to live up to what `great potential' means," said his longtime friend and former companion, Dorothea Sargent. "He wanted to achieve."

He started out well enough. He was Florida state president of Future Farmers of America. He became the youngest person to make his firm's million-dollar sales mark after he quit school to marry college sweetheart Lane Gourlie and sell life insurance.

But soon he began more than two decades of debt and losing ventures.

The first was U.S. Guaranty Corp., a computerized medical-billing firm that a business partner called a great idea ahead of its time.

But in 1973, U.S. Guaranty was suspended as a corporation for tax problems. Dubroff later was sued by the doctors he represented for collecting more than $80,000 from them but not paying the bills. He filed for his first bankruptcy in late 1974.

There were others ventures, such as POEM, a time-management seminar Dubroff designed to show how to "get exactly what you want, when you want it, how you want it. . . ."

When POEM didn't make it, Dubroff's friend Steven Dewey was left to negotiate a $25,000 bill. Other investors in Dubroff ventures had similar experiences. Yet most forgave him. They say he truly believed the visions he sold.

After a while, though, his enthusiasm became taxing, said Dewey, who remained his friend: "You get tired of the too-high expectations and the too-lofty target that's not ever met."

`Life here was so different'

Influenced by his positive-thinking mother, Dubroff was constantly seeking self-improvement. He joined est, the quintessential California self-help movement, leading seminars of 300 clapping people. He learned tai chi before it was in vogue.

Then in the mid-1980s, the son of the metaphysical mother met spiritual healer Lisa Blair Hathaway, the daughter of a medium who still holds seances in a spiritualist church. Dubroff was coming out of his second marriage. Lane had left in 1977. In 1981, he married an actress, Theressa Anne Colisino. Their divorce was final in 1986.

Dubroff and Hathaway spent their weekends in a 1964 Airstream parked in an old-growth forest near the foot of Mount Shasta. (Dubroff ended up owing $3,000 rent on the lot.) And they fire-walked through courtship across beds of hot coals.

"Lloyd got two blisters on his feet because he said he thought `hot,' " said Hathaway, who came out unscorched. "It was still an incredible experience."

They were giggly, madly in love, and Dubroff often seized on Hathaway's ideas with great enthusiasm - such as giving birth to their son, Joshua, under water.

Jessica was born May 5, 1988, in Hercules in Contra Costa County, Calif., in a birthing tub that Dubroff had built himself. Though the financial troubles continued, it was Hathaway's child-rearing techniques that led the couple to split in 1990.

The early 1990s seemed to get worse financially. Dubroff met his third wife, Melinda Hurst, who was 19 to his 52 when they married five years ago. Their daughter, Kendall, was born in 1992. Though friends said they had never seen Dubroff happier, landlords filed eviction papers against the couple twice in two years for rentals in Oakland and Palo Alto, Calif. Dubroff spent three years writing a management computer program he couldn't sell. Money was so tight that Hathaway went on welfare for six months in Marin County, which by law forced her to sue Dubroff for child support.

Hathaway thought it unnecessary because she knew that if Dubroff had money, it would go to his children. Others agreed.

"I think that he was an honorable and responsible man, because he . . . was always there for the kids," said Ruth Rutherford, Hathaway's former neighbor. "Certain things you just can't fake."

At one point, Hathaway showed up with the children at Lloyd and Melinda's door. Dubroff couldn't turn them away. When Hathaway left two months later to care for her ailing father, she was pregnant with Dubroff's sixth child, Jasmine, who was born in a Falmouth, Mass., bathtub with the help of Joshua and Jessica.

In 1993, Dubroff had filed for his second bankruptcy. Friends and family said it was the last straw. He resolved after three decades of ups and downs and living hand to mouth to finally be successful.

In his mid-50s, Lloyd Dubroff, seeker, risk-taker and achiever, at last seemed to be getting somewhere. He took a job with PSW3 Financial Services, a San Francisco firm that placed him on lucrative consulting contracts with large companies.

His clients and colleagues loved him. The money was coming in.

Turning things around

Though he still owed some debts, his new family had a nice house to rent in San Mateo, and Hathaway and her three children had a home in Pescadero and a new van. He and Melinda were shopping for yachts in San Diego, according to longtime friend Harold Dill. And he was talking to his brother, Duncan, a Houston geologist, about investing in one of his oil wells.

But of all his big notions, the cross-country flight was the one that took hold.

Friends vigorously deny that Dubroff was out to make money from the flight. Dorothea Sargent, who manages actors and writers in Los Angeles, said that if Dubroff were looking to make a buck, he would have called her first. He didn't.

But friends don't dispute that he could seize on an idea. He would be the one to suggest a record-setting trip; to put the slogan "From Sea to Shining Sea" on 200 hats; to help Jessica write to the president.

And it also was part of his pattern to let reality slip. Writing the president became trying to meet with the president. A one-way trip became across the country and back.

But the reality was that Jessica had only 35 hours flying time. Her longest flight had been to Watsonville. Yet her flying schedule covered 6,900 miles in eight days. She was to spend up to eight hours a day in the air, the daily maximum the Federal Aviation Administration allows for commercial pilots.

The reality was that, unlike Jessica, nine other child pilots who made record flights all came from aviator families, had a minimum of 50 hours of flight time and traveled a maximum distance of 5,500 miles in eight days.

They were accompanied by veteran instructors, some of whom had trained Navy fighter pilots and commercial airline crews. Reid had been a flight instructor for four years, licensed to fly only single-engine planes.

Then there was Dubroff saying he had no problem affording the $15,000 trip. Yet Hathaway sought donations.

"I saw that it was going to be a (financial) press for Lloyd," Hathaway said recently. "I mean, Lloyd didn't even have a savings account."

Dubroff kept calling

When Dubroff first mentioned the cross-country flight, Reid didn't take it seriously - until Dubroff kept calling. Reid, known for being cautious and safety-conscious, told his wife he wasn't thinking about records. He saw the trip as a paid vacation. He promised her he would be careful.

"He said, `Ana, there's no way that I'm going to go into any weather, and you know that,' " Ana Reid said.

Then the media avalanche rumbled all the way from the weekly Half Moon Bay Review to the nationally televised "Today" show.

By departure day, the trip had taken on a life of its own. Reid was asked to come to the Half Moon Bay Airport at 5:30 a.m. that day for a "Good Morning America" interview, recalled George Auld, co-owner of the ill-fated plane. "He said, `Boy, this thing is really getting out of hand.' "

At 5:30 p.m. April 10, Jessica and her crew landed in Cheyenne, Wyo., completing the first leg of their trip. They were greeted on the tarmac by Cheyenne's mayor, cheering students and television crews.

At 5:30 a.m. April 11, when Jessica awoke, bouncing on the bed and prodding the adults to get up, the skies over Cheyenne airport were clear. Dubroff and Reid told her they wanted to sleep in.

At 6 a.m. Anne Yeager, a local television reporter, waited to interview the Dubroffs, who had planned to be at the airport by this time. The skies were still clear.

By 7:45 a.m., Jessica and her crew arrived to clouds, light rain and wind at 15 knots. The media interviews began anew, ending only with Dubroff's urging: "We have to go! We have to go!"

At 8:18 a.m., the pilot of a twin-engine plane reported turbulence and wind shear. Reid confirmed he got the transmission.

At 8:19, the Cessna taxied out to the runway in a driving rain. A United Express commuter pilot radioed that he was delaying his departure.

At 8:20 a.m., the cautious veteran pilot who vowed he wouldn't fly in bad weather and his young pupil took off into the teeth of a thunderstorm.

In the end, Lloyd Dubroff finally achieved international attention. The man who would move heaven and Earth for his children sparked a far-reaching debate on parental responsibility covered by Time magazine under the headline "Who Killed Jessica?" The FAA is likely to change its rules for underage pilots, and FAA Administrator David Hinson wrote individual letters to the nation's flight instructors warning against students with "unusual training requests."

But while the crash gave light to his limitations, Dubroff's friends remain devoted to the man of boundless aspirations.

"He was at the height of his powers at the time of his death," said one longtime business partner. Had he lived, "he may have made the cover of Time for something he did with his brain. Only in death did he get the recognition he may have deserved otherwise."