Sky Girls

by Gene Nora Jessen

  Louise Thaden had opportunity to sit in the stands among the bloodthirsty fans interacting with the racers. She was stunned at what she heard and wrote it down—the reaction of a spiritual and normally demure woman whose children never heard her utter an obscenity. She responded to the ferocity of the crowd:

  I go to the national races

  I sit with the crowd who roars

  “Get goin’ you goddamn pilots,

  Get goin’ and make a score.”

  “What the hell your personal safety,

  What the hell your wife and kids—

  Just make a record and keep it,

  So take off the goddamm lid!”

  “Get goin’ you goddamn pilots,

  Get goin’ to make a score!”

  “What the hell do we care for pilots?

  There always are plenty more!”

  Maybe you’ll win some money—

  Maybe you’ll get a large prize,

  But what profit, fame or glory

  If in a grave you lie?

  Soon you’ll be forgotten—

  Soon there’ll be others more

  Who’ll far surpass your record

  To the same crowd’s lusty roar.

  —LOUISE THADEN

  The Mystery Ship had problems, and Thaden never got to fly it. Walter Beech quietly withdrew the airplane and shipped it back to Wichita via train. He replaced the Chevrolet engine, which was not working out with a Wright engine. Both Jimmy Doolittle and Jimmy Haizlip later raced a Mystery Ship, though Doolittle bailed out of his when the wings failed and it burned. Although it was a racing fool, only five were ever built.

  Louise Thaden and her husband, Herb, moved to Pittsburgh to operate his Thaden Metal Airplane Company, and Louise got a job as director of the Women’s Division of the Penn School of Aviation. Between the birth of her son Bill and her daughter Pat, Louise and fellow aviator Frances Marsalis achieved a new record in a refueling endurance flight. They kept a Curtiss Thrush aloft for over eight days over Long Island, including seventy-eight air-to-air refueling contacts. The lissome couple pumped two hundred gallons by hand every twenty-four hours.

  In 1936, Louise Thaden and Blanche Noyes stunned the aviation world by winning the Bendix Trophy race from New York City to Los Angeles, which had chivalrously been opened to women. Once again under Walter Beech’s sponsorship, they flew a stock Beech Staggerwing. When Thaden came through Wichita and Beech found out they’d been flying at cruise power, he told Thaden in no uncertain terms to open it up to full power. She said okay, but continued to fly it the way she wanted, at cruise. At the finish line, her mentor grinned. “Nice work, fella. The Old Man knows what he’s talking about, doesn’t he?” Thaden and Noyes beat all the men, as well as Amelia Earhart and Helen Richey who were flying Amelia’s Lockheed. Thaden received the nation’s top aviation award, the Harmon Trophy, and she was named the outstanding woman pilot in the United States for 1936.

  Throughout her lifetime, Louise Thaden flew airplanes and urged others to apply their talents to aviation. She continually supported various Ninety-Nines projects and inspired Civil Air Patrol Cadets. Her son Bill learned to fly and made a career as an airline pilot, and both Louise Thaden’s daughter, Pat Thaden Webb, and granddaughter, Terry von Thaden (Bill’s daughter), became pilots and members of the Ninety-Nines.

  Louise Thaden’s perspective was certainly affected by flying airplanes. She said, “Flying does something to one spiritually; it makes all life a bit more worthwhile; it gives one a sense of values. When big estates dwindle to less-than-doll-house proportions when viewed from the air, why be concerned over petty troubles—or if one’s own castle happens to be a combination living-bedroom-kitchenette? And the immensity of the universe—it takes a flight high up in the air to bring its giganticness really home.”

  Thaden wrote in her book High, Wide and Frightened: “To us, the successful completion of the derby was of more importance than life or death. We women of the derby were out to prove that flying was safe.” Her book emphasized the pilot’s competitive nature, but also evoked her self-effacing temperament and the reasons why she is not as widely known today as other pioneer pilots.

  Thaden is the heroine of the modern Staggerwing Club, a group of owners of one of Walter Beech’s most popular designs, and the airplane that draws pilots to stop and stare even today. A good part of her aviation memorabilia is enshrined in the Staggerwing Museum in Tullahoma, Tennessee, including her original pilot’s license number 6850 signed by Orville Wright.

  Staggerwing Club enthusiast Dub Yarbrough undertook a years-long quest to find Thaden’s original Travel Air, and he eventually located remnants of the old airplane. After a multiyear restoration project, Susan Louise Dusenbury, a DC-9 captain for Airborne Express, flew the sixty-year-old NC671H on a sentimental journey along the original route of the 1929 Women’s Air Derby. Dusenbury was the first female in the United States to hold an FAA Inspection Authorization (she’s a licensed aircraft and power plant mechanic). Since Dusenbury restores airplanes herself, she could not be more appreciative of the restored aircraft or its historical significance.

  It was my privilege to fly formation as a passenger in a Beech Staggerwing with Dusenbury alongside, leading in the Travel Air, into Beech Airport in Wichita on that recreated historical flight. For a period of time, Beech Field served as my own home field. It was also the home of both airplanes. Photos of Louise Thaden always held a prominent place in Mrs. Beech’s office.

  The actual airplane in which Thaden flew to fame in 1929 is now owned and treasured by the Ninety-Nines Museum of Women Pilots located on Will Rogers World Airport in Oklahoma City. Ninety-Nines also hold Thaden in their hearts, and her cloth flying helmet was carried into space by astronaut and Ninety-Nines member Linda Godwin, then it was returned for display in the Ninety-Nines Museum.

  Asked to compare the first Women’s Air Derby run in 1929 and the modern Powder Puff Derby, Thaden had declared them to be “not of slightest kin. They are as totally different as a horse to a rabbit. It [the 1929 derby] not only was the first of its kind but has since proved to be the last of its kind as well. It was an exciting, thrilling, sometimes chilling pioneering adventure, replete with unknowns, an inevitability of all firsts.”

  Nobody summed up flying better than Thaden: “There is really nothing nicer than flying in a good airplane over pretty country on a beautiful day—you just feel so good, so exuberant, so, oh, I don’t know, but there is a feeling that you would like to beat yourself on the chest and emit several howls à la Tarzan, pure joy of being alive.”

  Evelyn “Bobbi” Trout apparently hadn’t had enough adventures in the air derby, so she proceeded to have another en route home. A new distributor for the Golden Eagle Chief asked if he could ride along with Trout from Cleveland back to California. Trout was glad to have the company. She flew the first leg to St. Louis herself, then turned the controls over to the other pilot west of St. Louis. Encountering a storm, the two found a likely looking field in which to land, but they discovered too late that it was what Trout described as “gumbo.” “The minute our wheels touched down, the small wheels were grabbed as if we flew into a pool of glue, and our nose and left wing went up and down and around like scrambled eggs,” she described. They weren’t hurt, but the airplane was indeed, and the frustrated pilots were obliged to catch a train home.

  Bobbi Trout celebrates the completion of her endurance flight.

  Bobbi was eager to attempt a refueling endurance flight. Her derby sponsor, Golden Eagle, wished her well, but the company was sinking in the throes of the Depression and was no longer a source for Trout. A new sponsor and flying partner appeared at exactly the propitious moment. Trout and Eleanor Smith were offered Commercial Aircraft Corporation’s Sunbeam biplane with a Wright Whirlwind 300-horsepower engine for a record-breaking effort.

  The refueling airplane, a Curtiss Carrier Pigeon, could deliver 185 gallons in 4 minutes during each refueling contact. While p
racticing the refueling operation, the rigging was adjusted and readjusted until the Sunbeam could stay positioned under the Pigeon comfortably for their twice-a-day refueling operation.

  They were given an enormous radio for contact with the ground and the other airplane, but they left it behind since its position in the baggage area made the tail heavy and the airplane unstable. Hand signals would have to do. The two were finally ready to practice receiving a bag of food, oil, and mail by a rope from the airplane above, and to position the gasoline nozzle from one airplane to the other. On the first try, when the contact broke, Trout was sickened, swallowing a mouthful of gasoline. On November 27, 1929, Trout and Smith and their refueling pilots were ready for the record try.

  The women decided on four-hour shifts of flying the airplane and alternately sleeping on top of the gasoline tanks. The engine oil had to be changed twice each day, and the thirty-six Alemite connectors to the rocker arms on the nine-cylinder engine had to have grease applied with a grease gun. On the fourth refueling, the formation-flying Pigeon began producing black exhaust smoke, and the women broke away. Though dragging the fuel hose through a fence on landing, the Pigeon landed safely with no fire, but it was unable to fuel the Sunbeam again. Trout and Smith continued to fly until almost 4:00 a.m., when they had to land at Los Angeles’s Metropolitan Airport because they were out of fuel. The two stayed aloft over forty-two hours, successfully completing the first refueling endurance flight ever made by women.

  Eager to top her interrupted record endurance flight, Trout was invited by young movie starlet Edna May Cooper and her sponsor to undertake another flight, an invitation she immediately accepted. This time, they flew a Challenger Curtiss Robin with engine rocker oiling lines and a filler pipe for adding oil to the crankcase from the pilot’s seat. After a rough start, the flight smoothed out, and on January 7, 1931, Trout’s twenty-fifth birthday, a large chocolate birthday cake was lowered to the two women. At 172 hours and spewing oil, their flight was cut short due to a cracked piston. Yet, another record was in place.

  Bobbi Trout was a cohort of Pancho Barnes in their patriotic Women’s Air Reserve. They pledged to serve their country in time of national emergency. In 1934, the Gilmore Oil Company sponsored a round-trip transcontinental flight for the Women’s Air Reserve to publicize their cause. General Pancho was the leader of the three J-5 Stearman airplanes painted “Gilmore yellow” with the red Gilmore lion painted on the side. They relished untold adventures, but came home broke.

  Trout was always an inventor and innovator. During World War II, her Aero Reclaiming Company salvaged discarded rivets from various aircraft manufacturers and recycled them. She also had a deburring company for airplane parts and a printing business, and she was a prospector, realtor, and investor. Trout’s uplifting personality, unending enthusiasm, and tales of the early years made her an enduring popular after-dinner speaker. Trout passed away in 2003, and her biography, Just Plane Crazy, is a fascinating pioneer story.

  Mary Von Mach was the first woman admitted to Parks Air College in southern Illinois, where the racers landed en route. Though reluctant Oliver Parks admitted her only on three-month’s probation hoping she would wash out, she graduated in 1931 with her transport license and flight instructor’s rating. During World War II, Von Mach renounced her dream of operating a flight school. Instead, she did final inspections on the Pratt & Whitney engines for B-24 bombers for the war effort—a contribution for which she was honored by the War Congress of American Industry.

  Mary Von Mach

  She also was awarded the OX5 Bronze Star for “using an OX5-powered aircraft, distinguished himself (sic) by a successful ‘FIRST’ which contributed to our progress in aviation.” As she had been the first woman in Michigan to become a transport pilot and to own and operate an airplane, Von Mach was installed in the Michigan Aviation Hall of Fame. She died at age eighty-four in 1980.

  Vera Dawn Walker, who had been a stand-in for Tom Mix in the movies, achieved her transport license after the 1929 Women’s Air Derby. At ninety-four pounds, she became known as the “pint-size test pilot.” She flew a forty-eight-state sales tour demonstrating the Panther McClatchie experimental Rocker Armless Engine. Its claim to fame was having less moving parts than more conventional engines. The tour’s ordeals led her to declare herself the unofficial forced-landing champion of the world. Carl Lienesch, an early race director, said of the tiny racer: “Vera Dawn always struck me as a sweet, little, trusting girl who could get herself into the dangest tangles (with an airplane, I mean) but could always extricate herself before the bomb went off!”

  Amelia Earhart and Vera Dawn Walker

  Walker flew an Inland Sport in the Dixie Derby, dropping out with engine trouble the second day. After a repair, she proceeded on to the National Air Races to try her hand at pylon racing. She did well, taking a first place and then a second, only three seconds behind Mary Haizlip.

  In 1931, Walker delivered a Pratt & Whitney–powered Stinson to Guatemala. The exhilarating flight over dense forest and an active volcano was highlighted by a forced landing at the edge of a lake, resulting in a week-long aircraft retrieval. Walker soon returned home to recover from tuberculosis and never flew again. She died at age eighty-one in 1978.

  AFTERWORD

  The twenty pilots of the 1929 transcontinental air race wasted no time in formalizing their support group, then they opened their already international Ninety-Nines club to additional pilots. The accomplishments of the women who followed, resting on the foundation established by the Powder Puffers, are significant. Their flights, persistence, and bravery have enriched aviation and widened the world to women. Early pilot Margery Brown ran her own survey in 1928 at Curtiss Field in Long Island, New York, asking women what flying meant to them. What was it that made the fragile, noisy, dirty, dangerous, undependable airplanes so irresistible to women?

  Their responses were as varied as they would be at Curtiss Field today, had it not been turned into a shopping center. One woman said it represented a conflict with fear and risk, then overcoming it. Another admitted to a romantic pull—it was handsome Lindbergh who drew her to flying. A third wanted to make flying a career, and she took it very seriously.

  Margery Brown announced that dozens of women were flocking to the airport for instruction. Today, thousands are doing so. Flying airplanes is still a male bastion, but a long line of impatient, innovative, courageous women have demonstrated their love of flight and refused to be left out or shunted aside.

  The current pilot population shows that around 6 percent of pilots are female. But the breakdown of that number is enlightening. About 25 percent of male U.S. pilots are some of the highest paid pilots in the world, and only about 4.5 percent of women pilots hold the same level of expertise. Interestingly enough there’s a rather new statistic that 2.5 percent of female pilots are now Aircraft and Powerplant Mechanics. The early female pilots often handled their own repairs; however, A&P is now a legal certificate.

  We’ve been rich in pathfinders, with nary a Miss Milquetoast to be found. Laura Ingalls, like Amelia Earhart and so many others, dealt with the disapproving parents syndrome. (And what loving parent would want their child to risk her life in “one of those things”?) Laura Ingalls learned to fly on the sly, but keeping her bizarre record flights quiet was impossible with such dizzying feats as 980 consecutive loops and 714 barrel rolls, which did not go unnoticed by the press.

  Ingalls soon settled into the serious distance flights, since in the early thirties, fame seemed the only route to fortune for females in aviation. She made a seventeen-thousand-mile tour of Central and South America crossing the Andes in a Lockheed Air Express monoplane. Such a feat in the single-engine airplane at high altitude in predictably unpredictable weather is astounding. In 1934, Laura Ingalls won the Harmon Trophy as the world’s outstanding woman flyer. (Clifford Harmon had been an aviator/philanthropist who established three international trophies in the early twenties, to be awarded annual
ly to the most outstanding aviator, aviatrix, and aeronaut [balloonist], in the world. A fourth category, astronaut, was added later.)

  Ingalls’s exploits and daring made her one of the most admired and famous women pilots in the country. War clouds were billowing, and possible U.S. involvement was argued passionately on both sides of the issue. The darling of aviation dropped antiwar pamphlets over the White House and was subsequently accused of being a spy. She admitted guilt, and she was convicted and imprisoned for “acting as a paid agent of the German Reich without registering with the State Department.”

  WORLD WAR II

  During the thirties, aviation sponsored by governments was growing all over the world. Sixty-five thousand German men were being trained as pilots and mechanics, and nearly two hundred thousand were training in gliders. Japan had fifty-one thousand pilots, Russia was training six hundred thousand in aeronautics. The United States had a mere twenty-three thousand civilian pilots, the majority ranked amateurs.

  At the end of 1938, President Roosevelt authorized the Civil Aeronautics Authority (CAA) to train twenty thousand private pilots a year in the nation’s colleges. The program was called the Civilian Pilot Training (CPT) Program, and its purpose was twofold: to stimulate aviation’s growth and to build up a reserve of pilots to whom the military might turn. The CPT program was a huge success, and, despite adverse quotas, many women pilots learned to fly under the auspices of CPT or they taught in the program.