Woman of the wild blue yonder - Profile - woman pilot who flies wildlife researchers to survey animal populations - Brief Article

Animals, Spring, 2002 by Deborah Knight

Sandy Lanham isn't what you normally think of as a genius. She'd always dreamed of learning to fly but thought you had to be Wonder Woman to do it. Finally, at age 28, to get a break from caring for her three-year-old, she took a $425 tax rebate and bought 10 hours of flying lessons. On her first solo flight, she headed down the runway saying to herself, "Yes, you can do this."

For more lessons, she washed planes and answered phones at the flying club. A good pilot must know how to handle the plane in any position, so she went on to learn acrobatic flying and loved it. Flying was freedom; acrobatic flying was more freedom.

Over the years Lanham became a flight instructor, bought an old plane, became a single parent, and followed a man to Mexico to live in a small town for a year because he promised her it would change her life. It did.

She took her 1956 four-seat Cessna with her, and one day some Mexican researchers came to ask if she would take them up to try to find the pronghorn antelope they were studying. They searched and searched, flying over the Pinacate volcanic field, a place known as la maxima expresion de la desierta, "the ultimate expression of the desert." On the last day, they were sitting at an abandoned airport rationalizing their failure: "Well, at least we got to see where they live." Lanham thought, "No, this is not good enough." She made one more flight, and they found the pronghorn.

Even as a child, she had had a passion for wildlife, but that day a commitment was born inside her. "It was the beginning of a new life for me," she says.

When she returned to Tucson, she founded Environmental Flying Services, a nonprofit organization of one, and flew wildlife researchers all over northwestern Mexico. She lived off rice and beans for a year before her first grant came in. That was in 1991. Last October, at age 53, she received a MacArthur Foundation "genius" award of $500,000 for her work.

She has flown surveys of leatherback turtles at their nesting beaches, blue whales, pronghorns, parrots, whale sharks, shore birds, blue-crab beds, prairie dogs, and jaguars. Researchers pay only for gas and airport fees and her room and board. Flying with Lanham is usually the only way their research will get done. Mexican pilots charge high hourly fees, and Lanham is the only U.S. pilot who has managed to wangle the permits necessary to fly them out of Mexican airfields.

Nor will just any pilot do--special training is needed for the type of flying wildlife surveys demand. Lanham flies low and slow, often at a few hundred feet or less. If her single engine quit, she'd have only seconds to react. She has spent hours at a time over the open ocean, and in Mexico there's no search and rescue.

Over the years, Lanham has witnessed changes in the landscape and the wildlife. A nesting beach that 10 years ago had 5,000 leatherback turtle nests 2 years ago had just 50. "In my most pessimistic moments," she says, "I feel like a historian recording what once was."

Her message is, "We have to start ignoring the border in our attitudes toward protection, just the way wildlife do." This spring she will fly surveys of sandpipers and dowitchers that are being radio-tagged on Mexico's Baja California Peninsula and will then be tracked through the United States and Canada to discover which wet-lands they use on their migration to Alaska.

The MacArthur Foundation does not use the term "genius" in referring to its awards as the media do. The foundation believes "genius" implies too intellectual a focus. It looks for people who "actively make or find something new, or connect the seemingly unconnected in significant ways." Lanham seems to fit this definition: she has crossed national borders in her work because the natural world is not bound by them.

The sight of a blue whale--immense at up to 100 feet long--shining through the water still takes Lanham's breath away. Once, at 400 feet, she flew over a whale's spout just as an updraft blew the moisture in the plane's window. That was a moment of intimacy she treasures: wiping a blue whale's breath from her face.

Deborah Knight is a contributing editor for Animals.