Re cord-setting pilot Ruth Rowland Nichols in the early 1920s.
In 1959, pilots were broad-shouldered, square-jawed, keen-eyed types: in a word, men. Jerrie Cobb, with bare feet, a blond ponytail and freckles across her nose, didn’t look like a pilot when the doctor and the general met her on the beach. She certainly didn’t look like a record-breaking pilot with the Federation Aeronautique Internationale’s Gold Wings. She was used to the shock—“ You’re the pilot?” She could count on two hands the
number of women in the United States, who, like her, made a living from flying, and they were all used to that question.
From the time Therese Peltier first lifted off a runway in France in 1908, women who wanted to fly had to fight to do it. Flying was dangerous, noisy, dirty—it wasn’t ladylike. It required great personal courage and a knowledge of engines: men’s work, clearly. Peltier, a French sculptor, was among the huge crowds that turned out when the Wright brothers showed off the first fragile airplanes in Europe. Plenty of women wanted to watch the incredible invention, and a few wanted to fly it. Peltier took a five-hundred-foot flight as a passenger in Turin, Italy, in July 1908, and a few weeks later, flew solo in a Voisin biplane. She was the first in a long line of independent women who would fall in love with the freedom of flying. An Englishwoman named Gertrude Bacon flew in Paris a year later and wrote of her flight, “The ground was very rough and hard, and as we tore along at an increasing pace that was greater than any motor I had yet been in, I expected to be jerked and jolted. But the motion was wonderfully smooth—smoother yet—and then! Suddenly there had come into it a new, indescribable quality—a lift—a lightness—a life!”
Europe embraced it first, but the Wrights’ invention soon caught on at home. The first American woman in the air was Blanche Scott, the tomboy daughter of a wealthy society couple in Rochester, New York. Enamored of airplanes from the moment she heard about them, she went to the flying school in Long Island set up by aviation pioneer Glenn Curtiss. He allowed her to drive planes back and forth but did not believe that women should fly. He had blocked off the throttle so that Scott could only rattle along the grass runway. One day in September 1910, she spotted the wood block on the throttle, removed it and took a brief journey off the ground. Curtiss was furious, sure she would smash up his plane. (And if a woman were to die, it would be disastrous for his new business.) But
Scott landed beautifully, and she was hooked. She persuaded Curtiss of her ability, joined his famed aerial performance troupe and toured the country. “I was the first skirt to fly a plane—and that happened when there were only seventy-five men pilots in the United States,” she recalled sixty years later.
In 1911, a thirty-five-year-old Michigan journalist named Harriet Quimby attended her first air show and decided that she must learn how to fly one of the fragile biplanes that swooped above the spectators. The Wright brothers’ flying school wouldn’t admit women, but Harriet had a friend with a brother who could fly, and he taught her. Harriet earned her license from the FAI (then aviation’s governing body), the thirty-seventh ever issued, and the first to an American woman, and weeks later flew in an air meet where she made the first ever night flight by a woman. She joined a troupe of performing pilots, did loops and rolls above Mexico City to mark the inauguration of a president and was a fixture in magazine photographs in the elegant satin flying suits, with split skirts, that she designed herself. The newspapers called her the “Dresden China Aviatrix,” but Harriet was serious: she wrote about the future of aviation, predicting multipassenger aircraft with scheduled routes, mail carried by planes around the world and aerial photography for mapping. Then she conceived a bold plan: she would be the first woman to fly the English Channel, which no one had yet done. A year later Harriet did it, in a fifty-nine-minute flight through dense fog, and returned to the United States a national hero. She was performing with a male pilot three months later, in a two-seater monoplane above Boston, when the plane rolled and they were tossed to their deaths in the harbor. Their plane glided to a landing with little damage.
The women who flew in the next decade were, like Harriet, determined, independent—and aberrations. Katherine Stinson was a pianist from Alabama who took up aviation in 1912 to pay for music lessons and then never returned to her piano. The fourth woman to earn her license, at the age of twenty-one, she
began exhibition flights a year later. Crowds flocked to see her fly—just to see a woman take up an airplane—but Stinson was determined to impress; she did increasingly difficult stunts, was the first woman to skywrite, and then to skywrite at night with flares tied on the ends of her wings. She was the first woman to deliver airmail, in 1913; she flew exhibitions in Japan and China (where the president declared her the Granddaughter of Heaven) and was the first woman to fly in Asia. In 1912, her sister Marjorie, then sixteen, became the youngest U.S. woman to earn a license. When the United States entered World War I, Marjorie and Katherine tried to enlist as military pilots, but the air corps would not have them. Instead the sisters opened a flying school and taught dozens of army fliers, including much of the Canadian Aviation Corps.
The Stinson sisters were remarkable, but Bessie Coleman was extraordinary. One of thirteen children born to a Cherokee father and an African-American mother, she was working as a manicurist in Chicago at age fifteen when she decided she wanted to fly. Few flying schools would teach a woman, but none would teach a black woman. So Bessie taught herself French, moved to France, and earned her pilot’s license in 1921, making her the only licensed black pilot in the world. “I decided blacks should not have to experience the difficulties I had faced so I decided to open a flying school and teach other black women to fly,” she told a reporter a few years later. “I needed money for this so I began giving flying exhibitions and lecturing on aviation. The color of my skin, at first a drawback, now drew large crowds wherever I went. At first I was a curiosity, but soon the public discovered I could really fly. Then they came to see 'Brave Bessie,’ as they called me.”
She was killed when her plane locked into a dive at an exhibition in 1926. These were profoundly dangerous years to be flying. The planes were rickety and unstable, their engines were erratic, and pilots would not wear parachutes regularly for
another ten years. Yet at the same time, audiences wanted stunts that were more and more daring.
The price of airplanes dropped sharply after the World War I, with surplus planes sold off even as factories with war capacity built new ones. But there were few jobs in aviation—and a glut of ex-war pilots. Unless they were extremely well off, women (and most men) had only one route into the field: barnstorming. They would fly around the country performing stunts and offering rides (the name comes from the habit of the early exhibition pilots who would fly into rural towns, buzz the barns and set down in plowed fields). This was a decidedly nontraditional activity, but audiences would pay to see women do stunts, and a few women were willing to sacrifice reputation for adventure. Women began as wing walkers and parachute jumpers: Lillian Boyer would change planes in midair, and Gladys Roy danced the Charleston on the wing of her plane. It was a way to raise money for a real aviation business, such as flying deliveries or taking passengers on thrill rides.
And it was a way to fly. There was still something magical about flying then—the thrill of being in the air and doing something a little miraculous. The planes in which these women first flew had no altimeter, no fuel gauge, no starter. Just a stick and rudder pedals and, if the pilots were lucky, a compass. They used a dangling key chain to tell them if they were flying level, and they came in low enough to read the signs on the train stations to tell where they were. This flying was an entirely different undertaking from the big commercial flights of today. In a small single-engine plane, there is only the thinnest of skins between the pilot and the sky. It is a feeling of being small and powerless, and simultaneously of immense control. Modern jumbo jet passengers are lulled into detachment—but a pilot in a little Taylorcraft or a Staggerwing is intensely aware of how much space there is between her and the ground, of how quickly she is moving and how removed she is from the confines of rooms and walls and roads.
Flying was liberating for everybody, but for women it offered something extra: certainly social norms had loosened in the 1920s, but women were still valued for looks and domestic skills and still steered toward passive accomplishments. But in the air, at the controls of their own planes, they had freedom and total independence. And with huge crowds gathered to watch below, female pilots had respect. The aviatrix became something of an icon: competent, serious, a little rebellious, very much a woman of the Roaring Twenties. At the same time, however, the feeling endured that flying was no activity for a lady: it was noisy and dirty. Female pilots had to know about wires and spark plugs. They wore jodhpurs and boots and, as often as not, bandages and casts.
At the start of the 1920s, aviation became less of a fad and more of an emblem of progress; its backers advanced the still questionable idea that air transport, of goods and people, would one day play a crucial economic role. Now the focus shifted to setting records: for speed and altitude, distance and endurance. Aircraft manufacturers would give women the planes in which to try for new records, knowing the publicity of a woman lasting fifteen hours in a plane, or flying Boston to Los Angeles, would be even greater than that for a man who achieved the same stunt. And it all served the purpose of convincing the public about the safety of planes.
The competition for records held more than just a challenge for women: it was a way to prove they could fly as well or better than men. Elinor Smith, “the Flying Flapper of Freeport,” set a world altitude record of 11,663 feet in 1929. For her next stunt she flew under the four East River bridges in New York, for which the authorities ordered her grounded for fifteen days. All through that spring, Elinor and two pilots named Louise Thaden and Bobbi Trout competed for endurance records, lasting eight, then fourteen, then seventeen, then twenty-two hours aloft alone at the controls of their planes. They landed sore, dirty, faces worn
raw by the wind—and jubilant. One would accept the flowers and the trophies, and then, two weeks later, another of the bobbed-hair women who had become household names would snatch the record away.
Records were being broken every week when a tall, serious young woman named Amelia Earhart went to a California air meet with her father. Born in 1897 in Atchison, Kansas, the young Amelia was unlike any other little girl in her neighborhood: she played football and hunted rats and rode her toboggan off the roof. Her father was a railroad attorney—but he was also an alcoholic, and there was considerable grief behind the closed doors of an outwardly prosperous family. In 1920, Amelia took her first ride in a plane at a fair—ten minutes in a helmet and goggles—and when she landed told her parents she had to learn to fly herself, “knowing full well I’d die if I didn’t.” She found a teacher, an equally boyish and determined young aviatrix named Netta Snook, and did odd jobs to pay for the classes. Amelia soloed in 1920, and earned her license two years later. Her mother, Amy, and sister Muriel helped her buy her first plane, a Kinner Airster that she named The Canary. By October 1922, she had joined the record-breaking craze, and set her first, a women’s altitude record of fourteen thousand feet. (It was broken a few weeks later by another flapper pilot, Ruth Nichols.) The attention amused Amelia, but she also wanted a career, and aviation didn’t seem serious. She moved back East, to Boston, and began a job as a social worker. She kept flying on weekends, and she was the subject of considerable media attention: female pilots were still rare.
In 1927, Charles Lindbergh made an astounding solo flight across the Atlantic and became the world’s biggest celebrity. Immediately a race was on among the aviatrixes to be the first woman to cross the ocean that then seemed to lie at the center of the world. In the year following Lindbergh’s flight, fifty-five adventurers in eighteen planes attempted to fly the Atlantic;
three succeeded and nineteen died, five of whom were women. Ruth Nichols tried it, but crashed near Saint John, New Brunswick, smashing her spine in five places in the process. In 1928, a wealthy society matron named Amy Guest purchased a three-engine Fokker and decided to get the transatlantic record herself, but her family was horrified, and so instead Guest directed her attorneys to find a suitable woman to make the trip in her plane. Publisher George Putnam sensed a potential coup in having the story of the first woman to make the trip. Fie had read about the boyishly glamorous flying social worker in Boston and suggested Amelia Earhart. Guests team made the offer. The proposal appealed not only to Amelias sense of adventure but also to her desire to prove that aviation was safe. In June, she flew with pilots Wilmur Stultz and Louis Gordon from Trepassey, Newfoundland, to Burry Port, Wales, in twenty hours and forty minutes.
Earhart landed to instant fame. She never touched the controls in that first flight—she did not have a multiengine or instrument rating and most of the journey was through fog—and so the acclaim embarrassed her; she said she had been “as useful as a sack of potatoes.” But the fans didn’t care: she was feted in France and England, addressed Parliament at Westminster and returned home to rapturous crowds who jammed airfields to see “America’s Sweetheart of the Air.” Stultz and Gordon were more or less forgotten, but Putnam had a bestseller with 20 hrs. 40 mins., Amelia’s account of the journey. Amelia and her publisher spent considerable time together, and in 1931 George divorced his wife and he and Amelia were married (after she first made him sign a pledge that he would not hold her to any old-fashioned ideas about fidelity). Earhart was aloof and enigmatic, but she put her celebrity to work: she wrote for magazines, gave public lectures, advised the government on aviation, launched her own line of luggage and endorsed Camel cigarettes.
In 1929, organizers announced that for the first time a woman’s race would be part of the National Air Races and
Aeronautical Exposition. They had a single, practical motive: in the words of the races marketing director, Frank Copeland, “If the feminine is considered the weaker sex and this weaker sex accomplishes the art of flying, it is positive proof of the simplicity and universal practicality of individual flying. It is the greatest sales argument that can be presented to that public upon which this industry depends for its existence.” The race was set to run from Santa Monica, California, to Cleveland, Ohio; the winner on the tough course would get a real reward, for eight thousand dollars in prize money was put up. But then various men on the race committee and some male members of the National Aeronautic Association began to have second thoughts, picturing the headlines if a female pilot were killed. They proposed that every woman carry a male navigator with her and that the race start somewhere east of the Rockies so that no women would crack up in the mountains.
Amelia led the angry outcry: “I for one and some of the other women fliers . . . think it is ridiculous to advertise this as an important race and then set us down at Omaha for a level flight to Cleveland,” she told The New York Times on July 12, 1929. “As for suggesting that we carry a man to navigate our own course through the Rockies, I, for one, wont enter. None of us will enter unless it is going to be a real sporting contest. How is a fellow going to earn spurs without at least trying to ride?” The proposed changes were dropped, and the women were given the same eligibility requirements as men. Delighted, Amelia called the race “a chance to play the game as men play it, by rules established for them as flyers, not as women.” Will Rogers dubbed the race a “Powder Puff Derby” and reporters seized on the nickname, but that didn’t change the fact that female pilots, in a thrilling race, were on the front pages of all America’s newspapers.
An astonishing collection of women idled their planes at the start line in California. There were twenty of them altogether, some in white coveralls or jodhpurs, others in drop-waist flapper
frocks and cloche hats. There was a glamorous, long-lashed star of silent movies named Ruth Elder, who had made an attempt at an Atlantic crossing and had to ditch midocean (she was rescued by a Dutch oil tanker). And Phoebe Omlie, the first woman to have her own flying circus—she was walking with a cane, recovering from two broken legs in a recent crack-up. Twenty women started out in California and sixteen reached Cleveland nine days later. There was a horrible accident on the second day, when Alaskan bush pilot Marvel Crossan succumbed to carbon monoxide poisoning caused by a faulty engine exhaust in her new plane. She crashed in a mesquite forest in Arizona and did not survive. The other women were devastated by Marvels death but decided that the best way to honor her memory would be to continue the race. There were more near disasters—the wires holding on one pilots wings snapped, while other women had clogged fuel lines and engine failures. But fifteen women crossed the finish line, and as Amelia pointed out to reporters, that was the highest percentage in any cross-country race, men or women. Louise Thaden, her face burned brown by the sun and her bobbed hair in tangles, was the first to cross the line in Cleveland, and she was enveloped by a delirious crowd.
The race was the first time many of the women had the occasion to spend time in the company of other female pilots, and along the route they decided they should organize to promote the cause of women in aviation. In October, invitations went out to each of the 117 licensed women in the country, inviting them to a meeting at Curtiss Field in November. Twenty-six women flew themselves in and gathered in a noisy room above a hangar. They served tea and biscuits on a toolbox and resolved to work for jobs for women in aviation. There was a debate about what their new organization should be called. The “Noisy Birdwomen” was one suggestion. Eventually, Amelia Earhart spoke up from the back of the room, suggesting they take their name from the number of members they wound up with. When
all the registration forms were returned, they counted ninety- nine, and so “The 99s” they became. Today the 99s is an international federation of female pilots with seven thousand members in thirty-five countries. Louise Thaden was appointed secretary and began to organize them; by 1931, the group was formalized, and Louise suggested Amelia as president, as her fame would attract certain publicity.
The next year, on May 22, 1932, Amelia became the first person to have twice flown the Atlantic. But this time she was at the controls of her red-and-gold Lockheed Vega, making the first solo flight of a woman across the ocean. She kept herself awake with smelling salts and brought only a Thermos of soup and a tin of tomato juice with her. The thirteen hours and thirty minutes in the air cemented her fame; she single-mindedly used her enormous public profile to convince people that aviation was a safe and viable means of transportation. Three months later, she made the first solo transcontinental flight by a woman, from Los Angeles to Newark. In 1933, she made the first solo trip from Hawaii to the U.S. mainland by a man or woman, and the first nonstop flight from Mexico City to Newark.
That same year Amelia led a campaign on behalf of her friend Helen Richey, who was hired by Central Airlines as the country’s first female airline pilot. It fast became clear that Central had hired Helen only as a publicity stunt; under pressure from male pilots, the company would not let her fly. The Commerce Department (then aviation’s ruling body) was also determined to keep Helen grounded; it issued a directive to Central that they not let Helen fly in bad weather. Amelia fought that successfully, but Helen quit in frustration after three months.
In June 1937, Amelia set out on what she said would be her last record-setting flight, a journey around the world. The trip went flawlessly through Africa and Asia. Then, on a 2,366-mile journey over the Pacific, Amelia and her navigator, Fred Noonan, disappeared. Headlines blared the news, and an anxious country
sat by the radio, listening to bulletins until a huge search by the United States Navy was finally abandoned, having turned up no sign of the Electra or its crew.
Wing walkers, barnstormers and Amelia Earhart: that’s what a girl who grew up in the 1930s knew about airplanes.
Geraldyn Cobb was born in Norman, Oklahoma, just as the Great Depression took a firm hold on the country. She was the second daughter of Harvey and Helena Cobb. Her sister, Carolyn, born in 1929, was very much a little girl: she played house, threw tea parties for her Shirley Temple doll and had plenty of little girl friends. But when Geraldyn arrived in March 1931, she was something very different. She ran before she walked, climbed trees and crawled on her belly holding an imaginary rifle, imitating her father’s friends from the National Guard.
She was “Jerrie” from the time she was tiny. She was born with a speech impediment, an extra membrane that kept her tongue literally tied and twisted her words. She lisped and slurred; big sister Carolyn was “Taro.” Jerries family understood her peculiar speech just fine, but she had trouble communicating with anyone else. Her first day of kindergarten brought humiliation: the teacher asked the students to stand, one by one, and say their names. Jerrie repeated hers three times, but the teacher still could not understand her. The rest of the class tittered while Jerrie held back tears. When she told her parents what had happened, they made arrangements for a long-postponed trip to the doctor. Three times, on three separate visits, he tried to snip the membrane below her tongue with a shiny silver instrument; the first time, Jerrie wriggled free and fled the office. The next time she kept her mouth clamped shut and could not be persuaded to open it, and the next, she simply screamed in terror. Finally, the doctor anesthetized her and made the snip.
After the operation and “talking lessons/’ her speech improved. But at six, Jerrie had already learned another lesson: “School is no good. Talking can be distressing. Sometimes the best fun is to be alone.” She didn’t need to talk to do the things she loved best. With horses, she didn’t feel strange, and she didn’t have any trouble making herself understood. On her sixth birthday, her father took her to Will Rogers Park and agreed that instead of the usual poky pony, she could ride a proper horse this time. She took off up the bridle path before her startled father even had his horse saddled.
In 1938, the family moved to Texas: with war looming in Europe, Harvey’s National Guard unit was put on active duty. When the United States entered the war in 1941, he was deemed too old to be sent overseas, so he requested a transfer to the air corps. Here, too, he was classed too old for pilot training—unless he already had a commercial license. Harvey quietly set about getting one.
His daughter, meanwhile, was distracted: she had planted a Victory Garden, intent on raising the twenty dollars she needed to purchase a horse of her own, an old farm nag called Snowball. The garden suffered under benign neglect until her mother took over the weeding and watering: Jerrie was out at the stables, learning the finer points of hoof cleaning and currycombing. She spent all her free time riding bareback on the scrubby flatland around Abilene. “There were no fences, and you could ride as long and as fast as you wanted.”
Harvey came home at lunch one day in 1940 with an envelope and a gleam in his eye. He made his wife and daughters try to guess what was in it. Helena was sure it was military orders and they were moving again; the girls thought maybe photographs or a war bond. Harvey chuckled. “Nothing very important,” he said, elaborately casual. “Just my license as a private pilot!” And he had another surprise: tired of waiting for access to a plane on the airfield, he had bought one of his own, a tiny
Taylorcraft. His daughters could not wait another moment to see it: they skipped school that afternoon, and Harvey drove his family out to the airfield. He took Carolyn up for a ride first, and then it was Jerries turn.
“Even before the old Taylorcraft had reached 300 feet, I recognized the sky would be my home,” she wrote later. “For a child who distrusted ordinary everyday speech . . . for an adolescent who yearned for the freedom of the fields and the winds . . . for a girl who had learned to be alone—the sky was the answer. I tumbled out of the airplane with stars in my eyes.”
In that first flight, Jerrie found the same wonderful freedom that came with horseback riding. “In the sky there are no fences. In a field there are no roads, no paths, no limits on you and your horse. You move as you wish ... in either case you are moving — deciding which way to move, and controlling the movement. And whether you control the power of one horse or the harnessed power of 1000 horses is only a matter of degree.”
Jerries mother watched her giddy daughters with some trepidation; as the afternoons third passenger, she was less than excited about climbing into the fragile little plane. Harvey tried to thrill her with some banks and dives, but the engine failed and he had to “dead stick” (making a powerless landing) into a field, where Helena vowed never to get back in the plane. Eventually she let Harvey fly her back to the girls, but she was sure this flying business was foolish—and dangerous.
Harvey was working toward a commercial license and needed to fly bigger planes, so he soon traded in the little Taylorcraft for a heavier, open-cockpit Waco biplane. He was, by then, the target of an unrelenting campaign: daily requests from his younger daughter for flying lessons. It went on for years. He tried “no” and “you’re too young” and “it wouldn’t even be legal” before retreating behind that paternal standard, “ask your mother.” Helena, of course, said, “No, absolutely not.” But that did nothing to dissuade Jerrie: every day she appealed again,
asking, but why ?until her mother snapped, “Because your grades are so poor, that’s why.”
That was a response that allowed for some negotiating. Jerrie, at twelve, was still quiet and intensely shy. She didn’t have much to say to kids her own age; horses and planes were all that interested her. She wore her mother down and placated her with at least the show of attention to homework, until finally Helena allowed the flying lessons. Jerrie wasn’t old enough to ride a full- size bike to the airfield for her first lesson, and her father had to put several pillows in the cockpit so she could reach the controls.
The Waco was a fragile craft with thin fabric over its wings and fuselage and a maximum speed of ninety-two miles per hour, but it felt like a rocket for Jerrie. “In few planes today can you be so permeated by the sensation of flight,” she wrote twenty years later. “The propwash from the Waco’s sturdy little wooden propeller was a rushing, gushing stream of wind; once aloft, you also felt every gust on your cheeks, and the sun was hot and near.” In that flight, she says, she felt truly free for the first time.
After that, she met her father out at the airfield every day when he got off work. The plane would be waxed and gassed and ready to go when he arrived—“so we didn’t waste any time on the ground.” Pigtails poking out beneath her helmet, Jerrie spent hours in the air with her father, working the controls in the seat behind him.
The lessons went well until Harvey’s unit was abruptly transferred to Denver, and he had to sell the Waco. Jerrie also had to sell Snowball. Her parents tried to ease the transition by letting her buy a new horse (which led to a part-time job at the local pony farm), but she was miserable at her new high school. In fact, she rarely went to class. When her father found her truant in a park one afternoon, her plans poured out.
“I just don’t like sitting in classes when there’s so much going on outside. I can’t seem to get interested in most of the stuff in school.” Instead, she told him hesitantly, she had been talking to
the pony farm about a full-time job. (It was, after all, wartime and help was scarce, even help in the form of horse-mad fourteen- year-old girls.)
Her father spoke to her gently, agreeing she had learned important skills at the farm, but asking if taking care of horses was really what she wanted to do for the rest of her life. a I wish you could see the cockpits of some of the new planes at the base, Jerrie. Hundreds of gauges, switches, controls, dials. The pilots and engineers practically have to be mathematicians. People can’t just fly by the seat of their pants these days.” He told her how he ran away from school himself, how his days in the navy taught him what a mistake that was, and how he came back to the university much older than his classmates. They talked for hours, Jerrie says, and in the end she heard the truth in his words. She agreed to go back to school, and work as hard at it as she did with the ponies. But she didn’t expect to like it any better.
In Denver she joined the Civil Air Patrol—the corps of volunteer pilots founded in 1941 to fly sentry missions along the borders or search for downed aircraft above forests and deserts. The CAP admitted women from the first, and they made up a fifth of its membership by the end of the war. As a cadet, Jerrie got to spend time in the air, but only occasionally was she allowed to follow along at the controls. By then, she had plenty of flying hours with her dad, but they didn’t count as legal instruction hours. In her junior year, however, a kind biology teacher who was also a private pilot gave Jerrie her first formal flight lessons in his two-seater Aeronca Champion. One day in March 1947, they landed and were taxiing toward his barn when the teacher jumped out and told her, “Take her— she’s all yours.”
The Aeronca had an enclosed cockpit but the noisy engine made a rumble that surrounded its pilot. Jerrie pointed the plane down the runway, remembered not to yank the controls and gently pulled back, feeling the surge of sixty-five horsepower. “I
was in a wonderful state of silent aloneness, floating high and free on a small kite I could control.” After a brief flight and three textbook-perfect landings, she was on the road to her private pilots license.
For that, of course, she needed solo hours. All through high school, she haunted the little local airport. She washed and gassed planes, occasionally trading her labor for a few minutes of flying time. If she waxed an all-metal Cessna, she got a whole hour in the air—and the waxing only took her three days. “I thought I had a good deal,” she says. Flying time cost money, so she picked peaches and berries, worked as a cashier at the movie house, made drugstore deliveries and drove a scooter around town ferrying parts for the local garage.
And she waited: student pilots had to be sixteen to get a license. By March 5, 1947, her battered little logbook listed two hundred hours, accumulated since she was twelve. That day, her sixteenth birthday, she flew and passed the exam. Jerrie Cobb was a licensed pilot.
Courtesy of Pauline Vincent