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 $4 million.
Finch's adventure begins March 17, 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 says.
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 now a millionaire, at least on paper.
A doting grandmother and at times a generous employer, 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.
"She's tough. She's one of the most wired, focused people I've ever met," said Fred 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.
Being a pilot 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 explained. 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 the late 1980s, Finch restored a T-6 - a World War II training aircraft - to race it and perform in air shows. Entering this male-dominated world wasn't easy.
"I don't pay a lot of attention to the discrimination stuff. I just go about my business," Finch said. She reasoned that if she was persistent, she'd get her way.
She did, but it took quite awhile.
It got a little easier after Howard Pardue, an air show organizer, let Finch perform at his annual show in Breckenridge, Texas. But to fly in formation with the Confederate Air Force, a loosely organized group of vintage-aircraft pilots, Finch needed the group's approval. For three years she showed up at the pre-flight briefings.
"They always told me to go away," she said. Finally, Finch got a break at an air show in Houston. One of 16 pilots flying in the formation dropped out, and she was the only person available to fill in.
They gave Finch a spot where she got a lot of turbulence. But she found her position and held steady.
"I was so irritated with them, I wasn't moving," she said.
In 1991, Finch started looking for a new project. She came up with the Earhart idea over dinner with a friend and began doing 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 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.
Finch was drawn to Earhart, in part, by the parallels in their lives.
Both women set high goals for themselves. 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 a hangar at the west edge of San Antonio International Airport, where she also manages her two businesses and keeps her planes.
Her office is dominated by a large oak table where she spreads out her work. Behind the table is a map of the world; Earhart's route is marked with a red cord. There's a pin at each stop.
Finch frets over the Electra, which in November - just four months before the flight - was at an aviation repair shop in Breckenridge for work on the gas tanks, engine cowlings and wing tips. She flew to Breckenridge a couple of times a week to check on progress.
There, the plane was propped on yellow jacks, waiting for its new, stronger landing gear. The whir of a pneumatic drill punctuated "Dust in the Wind," echoing through the cavernous building as it played on a radio.
"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 the problem with the landing gear.
"The little stuff is going to eat our lunch," she replies as she runs her hand along the Electra's smooth, shiny skin. "Kind of dusty," she said, rubbing her fingers together. "Needs flying."
Later, Seastrunk confides, "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 observes.
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 can 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.
Distributed by the Los Angeles Times-Washington Post News Service