Despite her tiny voice and elfin build, 7-year-old Jessica Dubroff had big ideas.
When she flew out of Half Moon Bay Airport on Wednesday she wore a red baseball cap that said, "Women Fly.""Her baseball hat, her charisma - she was 7 years old going on 20," said a choked-up Jack McHugh, who delivered a bouquet of flowers to the airport near Pescadero, a coastal town where Jessica lived about 40 miles south of San Francisco.
Jessica, her father, Lloyd Dubroff, and flight instructor Joe Reid were killed Thursday as they took off in rain and snow in Cheyenne, Wyo. Jessica was trying to become the youngest person to make a cross-country flight.
Jessica's upbringing was far from the video game, Power Ranger-filled lives of so many American children.
She never attended a traditional school and was instead educated at home, along with her 9-year-old brother, Joshua. Her activities ranged from taking on a paper route when she was 4, to helping rebuild a house and working at a stable in exchange for horse-riding lessons.
Jessica sent half of the money she earned to sponsor a child in India.
She became hooked on flying after her parents took her on an airplane ride for her sixth birthday. She had taken four months of lessons and had logged about 35 flight hours before the cross-country trip.
"I'm going to fly till I fly solo," she told The Associated Press last week. "Fly till I die."
Jessica, who was 4-foot-2 and weighed just 55 pounds, sat in a red booster seat so she could see over the plane's dashboard. She used aluminum extensions to help her reach the rudder pedals.
Reid, president of the Half Moon Bay Pilots Association, sat next to her in the Cessna 177B Cardinal. The four-seater had two sets of controls in case Jessica needed assistance.
"Mentally, she grasps the concepts as well as an adult," Reid had said.
Jessica's father had said that the money he saved on tuition at a private school could be used for flying lessons.
Asked last week if his daughter's flying made him nervous, he said, "I'm actually more nervous about her riding horses."
Jessica, Joshua and their 3-year-old sister, Jasmine, lived with their mother, Lisa Blair Hathaway. Their father lived in nearby San Mateo with his current wife.
There was no television in Hathaway's home and the children's toys were the hammers, screwdrivers and saws that they used to build their own furniture.
Hathaway and her children were vegetarians and Jessica's favorite foods were brown rice, sushi and natural juices. Her only vice: french fries.
In addition to flying, she played guitar, trumpet and piano and read such books as the biography of Harriet Tubman and Hillary Rodham Clinton's "It Takes A Village."