ROANOKE TIMES
Copyright (c) 1997, Roanoke Times
DATE: Friday, February 14, 1997 TAG: 9702140015
SECTION: NATIONAL/INTERNATIONAL PAGE: A-1 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: BARBARA A. NAGY THE HARTFORD COURANT
A PART-TIME TEXAS FLIER is preparing to fly around the world following the same path her heroine did, but Linda Finch wants to serve as a role model for girls in other ways, too.
The sun is slipping behind the hills of rural central Texas, and Linda Finch, in jeans and a plaid flannel shirt, is at the controls of her three-seat Beechcraft Baron.
She peers through the deepening dusk, scanning the terrain 500 feet below as she looks for her farm. The engines drown out all but the most determined attempt at conversation. But Finch smiles easily as she banks the plane and finds a steeple that has become her aerial signpost.
For a few minutes - but only a few - she has forgotten about the chaos her everyday life has become.
Finch, who turns 46 next month, is preparing for the aviation challenge of her life: flying around the world on the route Amelia Earhart was following when she disappeared 60 years ago this July.
The two-month trip will take her more than 26,000 miles in about three dozen legs. On the longer legs, the San Antonio aviator's plane will be so heavily loaded with fuel that some might call it a flying gas can. Pratt & Whitney, whose Wasp engines powered Earhart's Lockheed Electra 10E, is underwriting the flight at a cost of $4million.
Finch's adventure begins March17, when she takes off from Oakland, Calif. She is rebuilding an Electra nearly identical to Earhart's and has assembled two Wasp engines from spare parts.
Finch spends her days tending to every detail of the Electra's restoration, haggling with parts suppliers, screening requests for interviews and preparing a middle school curriculum that's tied to the flight.
She also is juggling the demands of her own two businesses: a chain of nursing homes and a construction operation. She's raising a 2-year-old granddaughter, too, and trying to squeeze in an occasional date with the director of a Dallas aviation museum.
``We weren't out of control at all until World Flight just exploded,'' Finch said of her adventure.
Like Earhart, Finch wants to show children that big things can happen when they set high goals and work hard. That's something Finch, who dropped out of school at 16 to get married, knows well. She is a millionaire, at least on paper.
A doting grandmother, Finch claims not to be as driven as she was in her late 20s and 30s, when she built her first business with money scraped together from friends, family members and former employers.
But Finch is a demanding boss, and her single-mindedness can be intimidating. Her three marriages all ended in divorce.
``She's tough. She's one of the most wired, focused people I've ever met,'' said Fred W. Patterson, who sold Finch the Electra - one of only two remaining in the world. ``She's got a lot of balls up in the air, and she can juggle them real well.''
Finch's 300-acre farm near Mason, Texas - ``It's 200 acres of rock,'' she insists - has become her retreat.
She isn't sure how she got the idea to be a pilot.
It wasn't a passion when she was a child. As a teen-ager she thought it would be fun to fly a Corsair, a gull-winged World War II fighter. But Finch doesn't remember how she even knew what a Corsair was.
She started taking lessons informally in 1973 or '74, and got her pilot's license around 1979 when her nursing home business took off.
``It was just something I was going to do, and I had time to do it,'' Finch said. She paid for the lessons by setting aside the $20 a week she had budgeted for lunch.
She found she loved flying.
``It's an immense freedom. It's almost like being in another world,'' Finch said. She understands why Earhart rarely used her radio to report her position: It broke that feeling of absolute independence.
In 1991, Finch started looking for a new project. She came up with the Earhart idea over dinner with a friend and began her research. Finch cut up an atlas, taped Earhart's route together and pinned it to her living room wall.
Her daughter, Julie Cordero, remembers it well.
``She said, `I'm researching Amelia Earhart and her flight, and I'm going to re-create her flight.' I thought she was nuts,'' Cordero said. Finch had never been outside the United States, except to nearby Mexico, and didn't even have a passport.
Bob Fodge, a longtime friend, was less surprised.
``She's always doing odd things. You know most girls don't race airplanes, either,'' he said of a hobby she started in the late 1980s despite the resistance of the men who dominated the sport.
Finch was drawn to Earhart, in part, by the parallels in their lives.
Both women set high goals. Both faced overwhelming problems, fought back and became tougher for it. And Earhart, like Finch, didn't like people telling her she couldn't do something.
Finch wanted to do more than just retrace Earhart's path. She decided to use the journey as an opportunity to remind children - especially girls - of the message Earhart spread in the 1930s: that with hard work and the right attitude, anything is possible. She decided to call the project World Flight, just as Earhart had.
Finch is planning the flight from her office in a hangar at San Antonio International Airport, where she manages her two businesses.
Finch frets over the Electra, which in November - just four months before the flight - was at a repair shop in Breckenridge for work on the gas tanks, engine cowlings and wing tips. She flies to Breckenridge, Texas, a couple of times a week to check on it.
``Linda's not one that puts on airs. She's just herself,'' said Helen ``Dude'' Ezell, who owns the repair shop with her husband.
Out on the floor, Jimmy Seastrunk, a mechanic assigned to the Electra, reminds Finch of a problem with the landing gear, which needed to be stronger.
``The little stuff is going to eat our lunch,'' she replied as she ran her hand along the Electra's smooth, shiny skin. ``Kind of dusty. Needs flying.''
Later, Seastrunk confided, ``She's demanding, but not overly so. She wants the airplane at a certain time and she wants it right. You got to respect people like that.''
``She's kind of lucky to be in her position, the things she's able to do,'' Ezell said.
That's something Finch would agree with. She still worries about losing everything, but knows she has found a lifelong passion in flying. And she could always get a job and live on the farm in Mason - it's paid for.
After World Flight, Finch will visit schools and take the Electra to the Paris Air Show. Then she plans to restore an 1850 farmhouse on the Mason property, tend to her garden and relax.
For a while, maybe.
It's hard to believe Linda Finch would be content for long without another challenge.
LENGTH: Long : 122 linesby CNB