The Inquisitive Pilot

Preparing for takeoff in her four-seat Piper Archer on a sweltering July morning at an airport in Lincoln Park, New Jersey, Beverly Weintraub ’82 furrows her brow and then fixes her eyes on the task at hand. The intensity of her concentration signals to everyone on board that now is probably not a good time to chat.

She ticks off items from her preflight checklist. Gas, check. Tires, check. Flaps, ailerons, and elevator, check. Doors and seatbelt secure, check. Eventually, Weintraub steers the plane toward the runway, where it rumbles down the tarmac, and then, suddenly, the wheels lift off the ground. Weintraub gives the dashboard a little pat, as if to say, “Good girl.” She heads east toward the Hudson River corridor, then south at the river, steadying the plane to be at eye level with Manhattan skyscrapers. She flies out past Lady Liberty in the harbor, over the Verrazzano-Narrows Bridge toward the Atlantic, then turns the plane around to fly back up river toward Morningside Heights, where Barnard sits at her right. “There’s Low Library,” she says matter of factly, as if driving a car up Broadway.

Weintraub’s interest in aviation began as an 8-year-old flying to visit her grandparents in Florida. At 13, she told her mother that she’d like to learn to fly. Barbara Barre Weintraub ’58 held other aspirations for her daughter that didn’t include aviation. But as a kid, Beverly recalls the bustle of the airport, the takeoff, and, above all, an overwhelming sense of curiosity.

“I just wanted to know how it worked,” she says.

It’s an inquisitiveness that would remain central to her life and career. Weintraub eventually got her pilot’s license, along with becoming the polished professional her mother envisioned. The singular thread that pulls her disparate interests together remains curiosity, from learning to fly to becoming a journalist and writing her book Wings of Gold: The Story of the First Women Naval Aviators. 

Takeoff

In 1998, as she was getting her pilot’s license, Weintraub was working the night copy shift at the New York Daily News. She would get up early in Chelsea to make her two kids breakfast, drive them to school on the Upper West Side, and then head over the George Washington Bridge to the airport for flight training at Air Fleet Training Systems in Teterboro, New Jersey. Afterwards, she’d drive home, catch a nap, and head to the newspaper for work from 4 p.m. to midnight. Ideally, she’d train two or three days a week, depending on the weather. It was a grueling schedule. “You know, if you drink enough coffee in the morning, you can function okay,” she says. “Flying itself is really exciting, so there’s always an adrenaline rush.”

Weintraub doesn’t strike one as an adrenaline junkie. Now an executive editor at The 74, a news site devoted primarily to covering K-12 education issues, her demeanor is pragmatic, whether discussing the current state of the media or the experience of takeoff. 

She had only a few years in the air before the events of 9/11 colored the way she viewed her passion and, eventually, altered the trajectory of her career. That day, she was heading to the airport to fly. As a pilot, she understood almost immediately that, given the morning’s blue skies, there was no way that a plane crashing into the World Trade Center was an accident. For months after, the Hudson corridor remained closed to private aircraft. Not that it mattered — even if she had wanted to fly, everyone at the Daily News was working 12-hour shifts covering the disaster. Weintraub eventually did fly again, but it was different.

“Getting back in the air, knowing that ... this thing I am passionate about was used in a terrorist attack, my heart just sank. It was just devastating,” she says.

In 2006, Weintraub moved from copy desk chief to the editorial desk. She and her colleagues began researching and reporting on an onslaught of illness developing among Ground Zero workers. 

From July through December of that year, Weintraub and her colleagues Heidi Evans and Arthur Browne penned a series of heart-wrenching editorials on the lackluster response from federal, state, and city officials to a growing health crisis. The effort won the team the 2007 Pulitzer Prize in Editorial Writing for “compassionate and compelling” opinion columns that drew national attention to the illnesses affecting the responders and their families. 

Hard Landings

A few weeks after that hot summer day she flew up river from the harbor, Weintraub reflected on the women pilots who came before her — in particular, the women she writes about in Wings of Gold: the first six women to go through U.S. military flight training. She came upon the story on assignment for The Washington Post when she was commissioned to write an opinion piece after the U.S. Navy honored Capt. Rosemary Mariner with a flyover at Mariner’s funeral. Four F/A-18E/F Super Hornets flew in close formation with “one jet peeling off and climbing into the heavens in an aerial salute to a fallen naval aviator,” Weintraub wrote. It was the first time the “missing man” formation was flown entirely by women.

Back in 1974, Mariner had finished a four-year degree in aeronautics at Purdue University in just two and half years so she could be part of the first female flight training cohort when the U.S. Navy opened the door “just a crack.” She rose through the ranks in spite of intense pushback facing women in the military. Weintraub cites an article written in 1979 by former Secretary of the Navy James H. Webb in Washingtonian magazine under the headline “Women Can’t Fight.”

The comments came at a time when women were first admitted to service academies, such as the Naval Academy and West Point. Despite women service members suffering losses in a variety of military roles throughout American history, many people were still uncomfortable with women dying and being taken prisoner in combat.

In the end, Weintraub says, progress is sometimes a matter of numbers. “What is the critical mass of women [doing this] so that it’s not a novelty anymore? So that it’s nothing new anymore? So that it’s not remarkable anymore?” she asks. “That’s the goal.”

Rosemary Mariner certainly strove toward that goal. Weintraub wrote of reflections that Mariner made at her installation as command of VAQ-34, making her the first woman to head up an operational aviation squadron in U.S. military history. “We never accepted that it was okay for ‘girls’ to accept a lower standard, to expect less of themselves than men,” Mariner told the crowd. “Like so many of life’s achievements, the key is simple perseverance.” 

New Horizons

Perseverance proves to be key to surviving in many fields, not just aviation. Even at a time when most news outlets are shedding staff and advertising dollars, Weintraub has approached her journalism career with the same skill she employs when flying out toward the Atlantic, eyes fixed on the horizon.

She is currently researching a new book. She flies regularly, including five cross-country races from 2005 to 2018. She mentors young women in the Girl Scouts on aviation. 

In her current role at The 74, she is enmeshed in the national conversation on education. She knows firsthand the challenges that higher education faces, but she says that while there are many different paths people can take, a liberal arts background, particularly like the one she got from Barnard, provides skills for a multidimensional and fulfilling life. “It’s the ability to see various facets of an issue. It’s critical thinking. It’s exposure to other people, not like yourself, other ways of thinking about things, other religions, other approaches that you just might never encounter. It’s openness to what’s new. It’s building curiosity.”

It’s the very same curiosity that inspired Weintraub to learn how to fly in the first place. “Flying ties into none of my strengths,” she says, while admitting that she also happens to be afraid of heights.

In the air, however, one would never know it.