The girl wanted to go flying, so her mother thought she would send her up in a small aircraft and see if that would “scare the bejeezus out of her” and perhaps dampen her aeronautical inclinations.

“But she loved it,” said Suellen Lemmon.

She was speaking of her daughter, Sarah Lemmon, 31, whose romance with flight lifted her to the top of her profession as a pilot. Captain Sarah Lemmon was at the controls of a Learjet 60 on Friday when the plane crashed and burned on takeoff, killing her, a co-pilot and two of the four passengers.

Given what she had accomplished in her life to date, friends and family can only mourn the unrealized potential that died with her.

“She was smart and confident and brave, but not at all intimidating,” said her childhood friend Claire Molesworth.

The two women grew up together in the Lake McMurray area and went to Conway schools until moving on to Mount Vernon High School. Claire had been struck by how Sarah would pour her energy into something that interested her.

“She was just one of those people who made an impression on people,” Claire said. “She was flying and studying violin. She ran cross country.”

But the Skagit Regional Airport at Bayview became a major focus of her young life.

Suellen Lemmon said at 16, when most teens eagerly look forward to getting their driver’s licenses, Sarah opted to get her pilot’s license first.

The wasn’t the end of it. After her flying lessons, Sarah would hang around the maintenance shop at Chuckanut Aviation and pester mechanic John Ring with questions.

“John had a reputation for driving off other mechanics,” Suellen said. “But Sarah stuck it out.”

Eventually, Ring said he came to like the persistent girl who insisted on not only flying the planes but wanting to understand how they worked. As she became more proficient, Ring said, she worked her way into a regular summer job.

“I always just imagined her out at the airport,” her friend Claire said. “She was tall and beautiful, this 16-year-old girl in coveralls working on airplanes.”

Suellen said that her daughter had the advantage of not only being tall, but “she had little hands and could reach into the little places in the engine.”

All that time spent in the aircraft maintenance shop didn’t keep her from excelling as a student. In fact, Sarah graduated both from Mount Vernon High School and Skagit Valley College in 1995 as one of the first two students in the Running Start program, created for advanced and highly motivated learners, her mother said.

In the summer of 1994, Sarah and Claire joined a group of Mount Vernon young people on a three-week trip to Kenya. Travel became one of her passions.

“She always loved something that was new,” Claire said. “We wanted to travel and we thought, where was the furthest place we could go?” It turned out to be Kenya.

Sarah was admitted to Stanford and graduated in less than three years with a degree in human biology.

“She thought she would want to be a doctor,” said Suellen, who had long been involved with the Seattle Children’s Hospital Guild.

But a doctor friend at Children’s suggested strongly that Sarah get out and experience the world before deciding on a career in medicine.

“He said too many people go straight out of college into medical school without any break,” Suellen recalled.

So Sarah and another friend set off to Cancun, Mexico, where they spent half a year working at American Hospital. Once Sarah called her mother to inform her that she had sewn a severed finger back on an injured person.

“I said can you really get away with that? She said, ‘It’s really different down here,’” Suellen said.

Sarah returned to the U.S. after the Cancun experience, seemingly cured of the ambition to become a doctor. But her high school Spanish had gotten a boost into something approaching fluency.

Settling in the Los Angeles area, Sarah started giving flying lessons to make a living, Suellen said. She then acquired her certification to pilot jets.

She later went to work for Bombardier, a manufacturer of executive jets, and piloted the company’s aircraft on demonstration flights. Her Spanish came in handy as she dealt sometimes with the company’s Hispanic clients.

Suellen was a little uneasy when her daughter took up aerobatics, not only doing it, but teaching it.

It was some relief when Sarah took a job with Long Beach, Calif.-based Global Exec Aviation, piloting charters.

Late last week, a charter job took her to South Carolina. On board the Learjet were the much-tattooed former lead drummer for the band Blink-182, Travis Barker, a disc jockey named Adam Goldstein, Barker’s bodyguard Charles Still and assistant Chris Baker.

Sarah Lemmon’s co-pilot on the trip was First Officer James Bland.

Lemmon, Bland, Still and Baker died in the crash. Barker and Goldstein were seriously burned but are expected to recover.

National Transportation Safety Board officials say that the crew may have been attempting to abort the takeoff from the airport at Columbia, S.C., when the crash occurred, but the investigation could take months.

A memorial service will be held Saturday afternoon at the Corporate Air Center at Skagit Regional Airport, where Sarah Lemmon first got her wings.