Sky Girls

by Gene Nora Jessen

  The city had been named El Paso del Norte (the pass of the north) by Spanish explorers. An 1848 treaty following the Mexican-American War established the wide, wandering Rio Grande River as the Mexico–U.S. border, and the northern part of the city became El Paso, Texas, while the south was renamed Juarez. The Rio Grande River ran right through the center of what was still largely a farming community settled along the chief route between Mexico City and the Spanish colonies in New Mexico.

  A storm blew in with the first of the racers. The whistling wind demanded some impressive crosswind landing techniques. The women’s acumen did not go unnoticed. It was noted by the local airport bums, as they were affectionately named. Some of the pilots discovered that the crosswind component exceeded their airplanes’ capabilities, and they landed across the designated runway area to put down safely. Once on the ground, it was impossible to turn sideways to taxi without the wind picking up a wing. The spectators who knew enough about flying to realize what was happening grabbed the upwind wingtips to walk the airplanes to the tie-downs. The first airplanes into El Paso were lucky to get into hangars. The latecomers were obliged to tie their wings down tight out in the open, and the pilots secured the controls so the fabric-covered ailerons and elevators wouldn’t be destroyed by flapping up and down in the brutal Texas wind. The racers and volunteers covered all the openings they could, knowing full well that it was impossible to keep the whirling dervish dust particles from gnawing away inside the engine cowling and underneath the fabric-covered surfaces.

  Louise Thaden and Gladys O’Donnell

  Number 105, Gladys O’Donnell, taxied in, struggling with the buffeting crosswind. Thaden’s good friend Gladys O’Donnell was tall, flying in once-white coveralls, and she sported a white frame around her brown face when she removed her flying helmet. With the help of some local volunteers, the tired pilot secured her Waco. A race official sought her out with a telegram from Long Beach. Since telegrams were invariably serious business, O’Donnell perched on the wheel of her airplane out in the wind to read it immediately. Lynn Owen, age twenty-nine, a pilot for the O’Donnell’s flying school, had been killed when he got lost in heavy fog and crashed. His student was uninjured.

  Flight schools of the day were like fraternities or private clubs, where all present were intimate friends. O’Donnell was overwhelmed. She had been contending with navigating in the heat and the wind at a less-than-minimal experience level, with only forty-eight minuscule hours in her log book. The young, brave novice was bone tired, and her mind was still burdened with Crosson’s fatal crash. News of the death of this fine young man, a member of their airport family, was now more than O’Donnell could bear. She dropped her head in her hands and sobbed. She couldn’t stop.

  The day came grinding to a halt in El Paso. With the wind howling, going on to Midland was out of the question, and the rest of the leg was aborted. A furious sandstorm reduced visibility to a quarter of a mile. The wind made a high-pitched shriek as it circled around the buildings. El Paso hosts scrambled for overnight accommodations for their unexpected RON guests.

  Exhausted pilots, the unexpected hostages of this weather’s particular hell, took time to assess their progress. The unofficial standings at El Paso put Louise Thaden in the lead of the heavies. Amelia Earhart had the best time on the El Paso leg, but Thaden was still ahead overall. The light aircraft class showed Phoebe Omlie with a substantial lead. In fact, her lead was so strong that some thought she should have been in the heavy class. More likely, her airplane’s performance put her squarely between the classes. Bobbi Trout, not yet arrived, was considered out of the race at this point, and the early stop timers shut down their operation without her. The race officials obviously didn’t comprehend Trout’s tenacity.

  An imposing figure paced the ramp, steadfast in the mounting wind, awaiting Thea Rasche’s arrival in El Paso. F. K. Baron von Koenig-Warthausen, taking time from his world tour in a Klemm aircraft, had diverted to Texas to encourage his fellow countryman.

  Unfortunately, Rasche was running a lap behind and did not pass through El Paso until the next day. The derby’s managing director tried to placate the German, speaking admiringly of Rasche and telling the Baron that she had exhibited rare skills.

  Margaret Perry had been ill at the start of the race and flew through the fourth day with an unremitting high fever. She looked awful in El Paso, but she was determined to continue.

  Margaret Perry

  Newspapers were following the race intently and were full of information about the sabotage investigation, as well as following up on Crosson’s sad fate as described in this United Press dispatch:

  The district attorney’s office today questioned those who handled the airplanes of the competitors in the women’s air derby of the National Air races in an attempt to learn whether some ships were tampered with during the first overnight stop of the derby.

  Field guards, the men who serviced the planes, and race officials were called to the office of Chief Deputy District Attorney Thompson, in charge of the probe.

  Thompson said he intended to prove or disprove the sabotage accusations.

  Claire Fahy, forced down at Calexico, contended that acid had been placed on the struts of her plane, making it necessary for her to leave the race. Thea Rasche, German aviatrix, asserted that dirt had been placed in her gasoline. She went down near Holtville but reentered the competition later.

  The opinion prevailed among officials that the sabotage charges were not well founded. It was admitted, however, that preparations for the handling of the planes of the derby had been inadequate.

  It was tempting for newspapers to editorialize about this rare occasion with its unexpected calamities. The Midland Reporter-Telegram speculated that weather wasn’t the women’s only impediment in El Paso, but that the race had been halted to inspect and ferret out weaknesses in various airplanes. This was not true, but it was a way to assuage Midlanders who had anticipated the pilots’ arrival that evening, and were disappointed the racers couldn’t get there for hospitality and to spend the night. The paper pointed out that “the contract held with race officials will have automatically been broken—though through necessity.” People on the ground were learning what the aviators already knew—that everything in flying is ultimately dependent upon weather.

  Louise Thaden was writing a daily commentary for the Wichita Eagle under the byline Louise McPhetridge von Thaden. She wrote from Douglas, Arizona:

  We are all determined to carry on with the pioneer spirit that blazed early-day trails in spite of misfortune and trouble. The other entrants join with me in expressing sympathy for Miss Crosson’s relatives, and even though we are busy preparing for the next hop, there is clearly a wholehearted depression as a result of the bad news. We participants know nothing of the terrible rumors out regarding sabotage, which has been given such widespread publicity in the papers. We have implicit faith in each other and there is a spirit of camaraderie being shown that will keep us near to each other years after this racing event is forgotten. There have been numerous instances where little acts of kindness have cemented friendships that will live always in our memories.

  In Wichita, Kansas, considered the aviation capital, seven of the eight columns on the front page of the Wichita Eagle talked about aviation. In fact, the paper’s own Travel Air would be aloft to greet the racers as they neared Wichita. Marvel Crosson’s picture was captioned, “the first fatality of the women’s air derby.” It was somewhat disturbing that they inferred there would be more deaths. On one side of Crosson’s picture was a self-congratulatory piece about how well the Travel Airs were doing, then on the other side, news, or more accurately no news, of the missing Swiss ocean flyers Kaesar and Luscher that had last been sighted crossing the Azores on a Lisbon/New York attempt. In reference to speculation about the great Zeppelin’s attraction to American investment capitalists, Will Rogers hadn’t been able to resist remarking that “the Graf ’s sixty people were going around
the world in less time than a congressman can make a speech.” The Graf was just leaving Tokyo for America’s West Coast.

  In eastern Oklahoma, multiple forest fires had broken out, filling the sky with smoke and cinder that would affect visibility for the racers if not doused quickly. There was no rain expected. The newspaper plugged their coverage of the big air race and said, “Follow the ‘Ladybirds’ in The Eagle.” They reported that in Wichita, all the airplanes would be guarded by soldiers detailed from Camp Jones to patrol the field.

  Since El Paso was an unplanned overnight stop, the tired pilots did not have to endure another banquet. A little side trip across the bridge to Juarez, Mexico, was in order. Louise Thaden’s favorite drink during Prohibition was orange soda pop spiked with two ounces of vodka. She brought a cold jug of the concoction to maintenance crews before calling it a night.

  THURSDAY, AUGUST 22, 1929

  Race Day 5

  EL PASO TO PECOS TO MIDLAND TO ABILENE TO FORTH WORTH

  165 MILES, 100 MILES, 140 MILES, 138 MILES

  The Zep, in taking off here in Los Angeles, just missed spoiling a great trip and killing everybody by missing a high tension line surrounding the field. Towns bury their dead but they never bury their electric lines. There is one sure fire recipe for a pilot in a strange town, that don’t know where the field is located. Locate a high tension line, follow it till it crosses another higher tension one. There is almost sure to be a field there. If not, follow it till it comes to an intersection of three of more lines and there will be located the city’s municipal field. It’s as sure as the sure fire method of locating a speakeasy by following the town’s leading citizens.

  Yours, Will Rogers

  Syndicated newspaper column

  The racers had taken on a mantle of certainty by their fifth race day of nine. They had gained confidence in both their airplanes and themselves, having successfully negotiated the high desert country of the great Southwest. The women were bonding into a cohesive corps of woman power.

  Louise Thaden reveled in the beauty of the El Paso takeoff. She wrote in her Wichita newspaper report, “When we took off this morning at El Paso the [mountains] were blue with low, wide clouds crowning them and surrounding them with the shimmer of reflected morning light.” The El Paso to Pecos leg was not anticipated to be a difficult flight, with the air all washed out and visibility good. It was simply going to be a long day adding on all the miles not completed the day before due to the sandstorm. The route still crossed high desert, but the morning air was not yet manufacturing its jarring, invisible potholes and bumps.

  Nevertheless, adventures were to be had.

  By the time she reached Pecos, poor Mary Haizlip knew her American Eagle, specially built for racing, carried only two hours’ fuel total. Due to its last-minute delivery, she’d had no prior chance to test fly the airplane and to determine its exact fuel capacity. Though the airplane had a Department of Commerce license, it had been purposely designed with limited tankage to keep it light for pylon racing. Her fellow competitors carried at least three or four hours’ fuel, enough to get to the destination plus a little reserve. Haizlip had come into four timing stops completely dry. In fact, she had had to get out and push the airplane out of the landing area at El Paso. Since Haizlip was afraid if she mentioned her limitation she might be disqualified, she did not complain. With no reserve of any kind, Mary Haizlip’s silent resolve displayed an extraordinary amount of courage.

  Ruth Nichols in her airplane.

  Ruth Nichols led the way into Pecos across more of the “nothing” country—nothing much to navigate on and nothing growing, but it was a desolation of special beauty. This leg was the last of the high country, where the ground had been four or five thousand feet above sea level and low-powered engines were challenged to climb over the adjacent mountains. Sometimes, the pilots decided to divert off course around a mountain rather than huff and puff over it. The high, rough country also caused some apprehension about emergency landing fields. The pilots were always on the lookout for a good spot in which to put down in case of engine trouble, such as an alfalfa field or a pasture, and the desert country didn’t offer much.

  Nichols was acclimated by now, and the conditions didn’t bother her. There were some 5,500-foot mountains just east of El Paso, with a lower pass she could take just south of the direct course. She was searching for some salt flats up against the Guadalupe Mountains and should be flying over the south end, which came up right on schedule. Several roads funneled into Pecos, which was only 2,600 feet mean sea level. This meant the end of the high country.

  The rising sun could blind the pilots, but the low shadows it cast caused Nichols to wish for a camera and the time to circle and shoot some spectacular photos. She held up her hand to shield her eyes from the penetrating sun, scanning for the Pecos Airport. Everybody started looking for the airport from farther out than they could possibly see it. It was just human nature to anticipate. Nichols caught sight of the field teeming with cars.

  Louise Thaden, realizing a Travel Air was close behind her, kept looking over her shoulder coming up on Pecos. She landed and quickly taxied out of the way of the oncoming plane. Good sportsmanship dictated not interfering with someone else’s approach, though Thaden had the right of way. Pancho Barnes pressed on, landing hot on her tail.

  Barnes’s quota of luck was about to run out. Contrary to speculation, the incident that occurred as she landed had nothing to do with the previous evening’s excursion. She, like the others, had gone from El Paso across the Rio Grande into Juarez. There, the Mrs. Reverend Barnes had obligingly answered a challenge and chugged a pitcher of beer. Despite what people might have said, the problems that arose at Pecos was due to the race manager’s inability to control the crowd.

  The town’s three thousand citizens had done their best to clear enough mesquite and sagebrush to make a narrow landing strip for the racers. But on race day, seemingly every car in town was parked along the edge of the strip for a good view of the women and their airplanes. There was no safety margin remaining. It made for some very near misses and one hit, Barnes’s.

  Few realized that when pilots raise the airplane’s nose for landing, they are virtually blind to the front and maintain their momentum straight down the runway by way of their peripheral vision. In Pecos, a fearless and foolhardy citizen drove too far into the landing strip, so when Barnes descended, she landed right on his car, bashing in its top and demolishing both the Travel Air’s upper and lower right wings. Barnes was not injured, but the airplane was so badly damaged it could neither continue to fly nor be easily repaired. An irate, boisterous, swearing Barnes was out of the race.

  The dust had not yet settled from Barnes’s arrival when Thaden spotted Blanche Noyes, the pretty actress turned pilot, circling low overhead. Her plane looked like a wounded duck with a broken wing and badly crippled legs.

  “It’s going to be a crack-up!” Thaden yelled, shutting down her engine and leaping out of the cockpit. “Get fire extinguishers, call an ambulance!”

  The crowd was milling about the landing strip, unaware of their danger. “Get them back,” Thaden shouted, and she waved her arms at an advancing group of reporters.

  Noyes somehow executed a normal approach, then put the ship down with perfect precision on the right wheel. As it lost speed, the beautiful, crippled Travel Air settled easily onto the broken left wheel and slowly ground-looped, pivoting on its broken leg. Cameras flashed. As the wheels touched and the engine died, Louise ran toward Noyes. “Are you all right?”

  Noyes’s face was sooty black. Silently, she lifted two shaking, scorched hands. “I’m okay,” she said.

  The other pilots gathered around, and Thaden leapt up onto the leaning wing. She stood still a moment, then she pressed poor Noyes’s head to her.

  “What happened? You’re a mess—but it was a great landing. We all thought you were going to crash.”

  Tears made white rivulets down Noyes’s cheeks
, but she tried to smile. “It was a good landing, wasn’t it?”

  She said breathlessly, “I smelled smoke from the cockpit about thirty miles short of Pecos. Of course, I’m terribly afraid of fire, for heaven’s sake, it’s a wooden airplane with wings covered with dope on linen. But there’s no way I was going to try out that parachute and jump. Can you see me explaining to my bridegroom why I lost the airplane? And even worse, I’d miss the rest of the race.”

  She continued, describing an incident that included an emergency landing in the desert. “I looked for the source of the smoke, turned around, and saw it curling up from the baggage compartment beyond my reach. I remembered Dewey’s [her husband and flight instructor’s] advice to sideslip away from fire, keeping it away from my face and lungs. Dewey taught me that quick descent maneuver well. That’s how I avoided the dangers of a dive. I raised the nose, lowering the airspeed. But I was careful to keep enough speed to avoid a stall. That’s when I deliberately crossed the controls, stick all the way over to the left with the left wing down and full right rudder. That controlled the degree of turn into a field with the rudder pressure. I side-slipped down two thousand feet turning just enough to miss the worst of the mesquite.”

  The women and reporters who heard her seemed spellbound. “When I got on the ground and stopped, I leaped out of the cockpit and yanked on the fire extinguisher fastened to the floor, but I couldn’t get it out. I was frantic. I don’t know where I got the strength, but I ripped the whole case right out of the floor. The wooden flooring came up with it. After all that, I couldn’t make the damned thing work.