Pilot

Penny Porter, owner of Porter Aviation is best known for being a member of the Porter Family, an incredibly wealthy extended family along the lines of the Hiltons.She has been in the tabloids for reckless driving charges repeatedly and has been on a few talk shows.

As Pilot, she is a minor superhero with limited media coverage up to this point. She is known for her strange vehicles and her stranger method of flight.

Porter Aviation is the world leader in airship, with a line of blimps used in advertising and surveillance as well as a line of rigid airships. The Earth Ship line are extremely green and extremely safe and a low cost alternative to airplanes.

Background
1983-Birth: Penelope Patrice Porter is born to Paul Porter and Margeret Porter-Hughes. She is the third born of the Porter children. She is precociously intelligent and willful. She is also noteworthy in her proclivity to jumping off of things. Dreams of flying and love of flight are common amongst the extended Porter family, however Penny has the worst case in memory.

1983-1998-Childhood: Like all her siblings, Penny is spoiled rotten and privately educated. She is allowed to build and fly her own ultra-light at age eight (with adult supervision). She skydives and basejumps at ages below the US limit by travelling to countries without those limits. She is allowed to accumulate hundreds of hours of flighttime before she can legally obtain her lisence.

1999-Pilot: At age sixteen Penny obtains her pilot's lisence.

2001-College: She attends M.I.T. where she gets top grades and dozens of tickets for speeding and other traffic violations. Porter Inc. goes through a economic rollercoaster. The family goes through its own rollercoaster of infidelities, divorces, lawsuits and general chaos. Penny isolates herself from her family other than her grandparents.

2004-Death and Inheritance: Penny's grandmother dies of cancer. Six months later her grandfather dies of old age and sorrow. Penny receives the bulk of their stock holdings and numerous obscure holdings around the world. She is now the biggest shareholder of Porter Inc. Uninterested in business Penny secretly beings the formation of The Porter Trust.

2005-2007-Masters: She graduates and is buried in her books for two years working on her Masters.

2007-Discovering Portnov Heritage: Penny visits the properties left to her by her grandparents. While exploring an abandoned Portnov airship factory she discovers a hidden facility beneath it. The facility was used by her great grandfather, Max Portnov, during WWII as the base for superheroing in wartorn Germany. Over the next year she hunts down other hidden bases, uncovering more of her family history along with research notes, journals, armor, vehicles and weapons.

2007-2008-Rediscovery: Penny obsesses over her great-grandfather's things and his theories. She discovers that his research was based on that of his own father, who was a costumed hero in WWI and that there were Portnov costumed heroes all the way back to the Napoleonic Wars and the French Revolution. She discovered several flying suits, all of which were purported to have worked, but even quick studies of them told her they weren't flightworthy. Still, they DID fly, unless her ancestors were all liars.

2008-First Flight: Penny's research into her ancestors and their flights eventually leads to her own flight, first in her WWII ancestor's suit, then without it. Born with the ancestral power it only takes some experimentation in order to wake it up in herself. Unsteady and short lived at first, she steadily improves in control, speed, and duration of her flights with and without her suits.

2009-Porter Trust: Penny moves everything to New York. The financial work of the last five years are finally done. Most of her real estate holdings and a good portion of her Porter Inc. stock are sold and she purchases control of Porter Aviation to prevent it from being sold to a faceless corporation. Almost all of her money is put into The Porter Trust. Her family goes insane. Lawsuits fly.

2010-Birth of a Hero: Penny She lovingly restores her ancestors machines and in the process finally understands how they work. She starts building newer versions, improving them and is soon joyriding in all her new toys. While out flying she spots crime in action and without body armor, flies in to the rescue. Though wounded in that first encounter, she is hooked. Not only is it risky, and thus an instant turn-on, it is doing something good with her powers, following in the footsteps of her ancestors. She doesn't jump right out into the world of heroing though, she methodically begins training skills that she thinks that she will need, and refining her gear for this crusade.

Present: Finally believing she has everything in order to seriously start (And having finished the successful launch of her latest zeppelin for Porter Aviation) she sets out to be a hero. She submits her Doctoral Thesis, which is under peer review.

Personality
Adrenaline Junkie: If it goes fast or is dangerous, Penny wants to try it. The Flight Force had her jumping off of rooftops as soon as she could get onto the roofs, and with that thrill to start her off she has gone on to try out nearly every crazy thing she could think of. Swimming with sharks? Check. Running with the Bulls? Check! Breaking her arm skateboarding? Check!

Geek Squared: She loves science fiction and pulp and action stories. She knows Star Trek and Star Wars, Jules Verne and Robert Heinlein. She can geek out about science and science fiction at length, though if you really want her to go into geek nirvana, talk about flying.

Stubborn: Nothing makes Penny push harder than being told she can't do something, or that it can't be done. She is willful in the extreme. Most commonly encountered when her sex or apparent youth are mentioned.

Princess: She is a princess. She wants things her way all the time. She gets upset when things aren't how she wants them. It makes her mad. Everything would be better if everyone did things the way she wants them done. Obviously. For some reason this makes other people upset, but she still hasn't figured out why. Also...she can enjoy being dirty and grimey only when doing fun things that she totally wants to do. Otherwise, she will complain, and complain more. Perhaps if she complains enough, the dirty and icky things will go away.