Thrill-Seeker Flies High

(CBS)  Carlana Stone says it "felt so good! So exhilarating! So empowering!"

"It" is becoming the first female paraplegic in the United States to pilot a plane solo.

As Josh Rubenstein of CBS station KCBS-TV in Los Angeles reports, this admitted thrill-seeker doesn't let anything get in her way. Not even life in a wheelchair.

For 20 years, Stone has lived life on four wheels but, now, she's traded them in for wings.

"The guy in the control tower said, 'There's a lot of pressure on this little girl,' and I was thinking, 'That's an understatement,' " she said. "But I'm really — I did it! Ahhh!"

It was, says Rubenstein, hard to imagine Stone would ever see her dream of flight come true.

She was 17 when a momentary lapse of judgment changed the course of her life forever: Stone got into a car with a friend who was driving drunk.

"My entire identity was stripped away with my accident and, in an instant, I went from cheerleader and gymnast to paraplegic," she says. "And that's a rude awakening for a 17-year-old little girl."

The first solo flight, explains Rubenstein, is the ultimate rite of passage for a student pilot, alone in the plane, defying gravity, the world underneath your feet.

"You look down," Stone says, "and it's like looking down at life. You see the mountains and you see the valleys and you see the deserts and the lush wild flowers, and everything is just in a different perspective."

Stone's instructor, Mike Smith, is not only an accomplished pilot for the U.S. Forest Service, he, too, is a paraplegic. He says he couldn't ask for a better pupil.

"Well, besides being bubbly and jumping around all the time and exciting and all that good stuff, she's an excellent student," he says. "She pays attention to what's going on."

"I'm jealous of the birds because they get to do it all the time," Stone says of flying. "But … nothing's gonna stop me now."

Aside from flying and skiing and sky-diving, Stone has been an on-air TV reporter and TV producer, and she recently co-authored a book.