Sky Girls

by Gene Nora Jessen

  Markham was raised by her father with the same kind of freedom and male influence as Pancho Barnes. However, in a different time and a different place—in Kenya. She grew up alongside the sons of Nandi warriors, tracking game and competing, and she was a totally free spirit. She excelled at training thoroughbreds, the first woman to do so professionally in East Africa. About the time of the American Women’s Air Derby, Beryl Markham was bush-flying out of Nairobi, spotting game for hunters. Always daring, she could not be dissuaded from making a solo flight across the Atlantic—the wrong way, into the wind, east to west. It had not been done before from England, which, of course, challenged the courageous Markham. She flew a new Percival Vega Gull in 1936 from England to New York, into the prevailing wind. She did experience engine trouble, but fortunately, it came as she arrived over land, putting the airplane on its nose in a Nova Scotia bog.

  Martha King writes too, in every medium, but can’t be categorized. She’s been responsible for the flight training of thousands of student pilots of every level via books, videos, and every other kind of training material. She is also a businesswoman—the co-owner of King Schools—and became the only woman to hold not only every pilot category and class rating (including gyroplanes and airships) but also every flight and ground instructor rating the FAA offers. She was the lone woman among eighty men so qualified.

  The earliest heroines in aircraft manufacturing were Olive Ann Beech and Katherine Stinson. Mrs. Beech’s daughter Suzanne said that it always bothered her when people gave her mother a backhanded compliment for “taking over the business” when her father, Walter Beech, died. She said, “Mother always ran the business. Dad was a promoter, a pilot, and an engineer. Mother was a businesswoman.”

  There is another Katharine Stinson who came along after Katherine of the Stinson Aircraft Company. This Katharine Stinson grew up in North Carolina and, in a life-changing chance meeting with her heroine, was inspired by Amelia Earhart to become not only a pilot, but also an engineer. Easier said than done. What self-respecting engineering school would take on a girl in the late thirties? But Katharine Stinson persevered and, with perfect timing, became the first female engineer hired by the FAA when the men all went off to war. Stinson worked on the supersonic transport, saying, “Our country made a terrible mistake not making that airplane.” She worked with Howard Hughes on his extraordinary Spruce Goose. Her department was responsible for certificating every new aircraft design, striving for total safety for the flying public. Today, the university once reluctant to train a “girl engineer” proudly honors their successful alumna.

  HELICOPTERS

  Ruby Sheldon flew for the government doing some mapping. A remote sensing specialist for the U.S. Geological Survey, she flew throughout North America using the Grumman OV-1B (Mohawk), Sikorsky H-19, and Bell Huey helicopters as instrument platforms collecting data for hydrologic studies. In 1975, she operated the Huey on a drifting ice island four hundred miles north of the Alaska coast for the U.S.–Canadian Arctic Ice Dynamics Joint Experiment. Navigating in whiteouts without terrain checkmarks and little help from the compass is right down Ruby Sheldon’s alley.

  Watching tiny, white-haired Sheldon stroll across the ramp—well actually, she doesn’t stroll, she usually jogs—is a lesson in false perceptions. Most folks would suppose this lady is somebody’s little grandmother come to visit. Or if they see her get out of a DC-3 along with a strapping young man, they don’t comprehend that she’s the flight instructor.

  A lady named Jean Ross Howard also learned to fly a helicopter and then, to her great good fortune, gained employment in the helicopter industry. She said, “They paid me too.” Ross Howard, being the organizer type, decided all the women flying those crazy machines should rally ’round to fend off their detractors, and put together a fun organization, the Whirly Girls. Of course, the members don’t have meetings, they have hoverings. Any woman who has achieved any government’s blessing to fly rotor is a Whirly Girl, her membership number in the order of her rating. Jean Ross Howard is, naturally, the Mother Superior. The Whirly Girls sponsor scholarships and support the establishment of hospital heliports.

  Whirly Girl number one was Germany’s famous test pilot Hanna Reitsch. In 1938, she demonstrated the world’s first helicopter, up and over the unbelieving audience inside Berlin’s convention center. Whirly Girl number two, Ann Shaw Carter of Fairfield, Connecticut, became the United States’s first female helicopter pilot and flew tourist rides. A spectacular French woman made a name in helicopters. Jacqueline Auriol, called the fastest woman in the world, flew both rotor and jets. She had survived an accident as a passenger in a seaplane and required fifteen operations to rebuild her face. Not deterred from flying, Jacqueline Auriol, who was also the daughter-in-law of the French president Vincent Auriol, was determined to break the speed record of the American Jacqueline Cochran. She did so by over thirty miles per hour in 1952 and was awarded the French Cross of the Legion of Honour and the American Harmon Trophy, aviator of the year.

  The U.S. Whirly Girl number four was Nancy Livingston. After serving as an ATA pilot in England in World War II, Nancy and her husband, Arlo, operated Livingston Helicopters in Juneau, Alaska, to transport skiers, survey snow and water levels, fly rescue missions, give sight-seeing tours, and even count bears.

  Loretta Foy was a Warner Brothers “Busby Berkeley Girl,” dancing in movie musicals in the late thirties. Foy learned to fly and became a WASP in World War II. She made a career in helicopters after the war, setting up the helicopter traffic routes in the Los Angeles basin and gaining a reputation as a top rotor instructor. She also set up a police helicopter pilot training program which spread across the United States and to twenty-one foreign countries. Ironically, Loretta Foy was rescued out of her own swimming pool by helicopter during a devastating Los Angeles fire that surrounded her home and neighborhood.

  New York State’s first Whirly Girl was Doris Renninger Brell. Renninger Brell held down a highly prestigious job as the general manager of the Wings Club in New York City, the stomping grounds of virtually every giant of aviation industry, history, and achievement.

  Another kind of businesswoman flies helicopters in her occupation, putting meat on our tables. Pat Jenkins and her husband own a large cattle ranch in the desert country of southeastern Oregon. Distances are so great that moving cattle and mending fence are especially time-consuming, whether in pickup trucks or on horseback. Pat flies the fencelines and moves recalcitrant steers with her cowpony, “Woodstock,” a yellow Hughes 300 helicopter, never flying much more than fence height.

  Jenkins says, “Initially I knew nothing about how to move cattle, either on horseback or with a helicopter. To learn, I watched how the cowboys do it and tried to do the same thing. They don’t barge into a bunch with whoops and hollers, so neither do I. I begin pushing one cow at a time from the perimeter in the direction they need to go. I fly just above the sagebrush and as far away from the cows as I can, and still get them moving. I don’t want my cows to run wildly. I just want them to walk at their own speed. I fly low and slowly behind them in a hot, dusty hover.”

  AIR SHOWS

  Displayed at the Smithsonian Air and Space Museum is a tiny airplane designed by Curtis Pitts and built in 1946, called a Pitts Special. The airplane weighs about 550 pounds, is open cockpit and biwing, and is a single-seat sport and exhibition aircraft with a wingspan of only fifteen feet. The ultimate competitor, aerobatic champ Betty Skelton saw it and had to have one for competition. On her first flight home after purchasing the airplane, it showed her its most famous quality, a propensity for turning about its own axis upon landing—a ground loop. When Skelton muttered, “You little stinker!” the airplane got its name and went on to become one of the most famous aerobatic airplanes ever built. The Little Stinker’s registration number is N22E, two, two easy. Betty Skelton excelled not only in flying, but also as a race car driver, and even drove jump boats in Cypress Gardens, Florida.

  A
nother woman whose signature airplane is owned and displayed by the Smithsonian Air and Space Museum is Patty Wagstaff, whose historic Extra 260 is displayed in the Pioneers of Flight Gallery. She pinned down the U.S. women’s aerobatic championships in 1991 and 1992, and was particularly proud to win the Betty Skelton First Lady of Aerobatics Trophy. However, she was not satisfied until she was named the U.S. aerobatic champ, without the “woman” modifier. Sure enough, in both 1992 and 1993, Patty Wagstaff was the U.S. champ, period. She continues as a major draw on the air show circuit today.

  Racing fever emanates from diverse motivations—fun, camaraderie, experience, challenge. Marion Jayne raced to win, and her results fill a large display case in the Ninety-Nines Museum of Women Pilots.

  In thirty-one years, Marion Jayne won more than twenty cross-country airplane races and twice flew races around the world. Fellow competitors knew that Jayne was not afraid to push the edge to win. Flying across Siberia and contending with thunderstorms, ice, negligible navigational aids, and air traffic controllers minimally acquainted with the language of aviation (English) should have been more than enough of a challenge on one flight. However, Jayne had a propeller spinner fly into her windscreen in that same race creating a hole, and took second place. On another similar around-the-world race, she and her daughter won.

  PHILANTHROPY

  Some women who fly airplanes are compelled to share their good fortune. When Pat Blum learned to fly, she noticed how many corporate airplanes at her home airport in Westchester County, New York, departed with several empty seats. Blum and her friend Jay Weinberg were both cancer survivors and knew how difficult it was sometimes for ordinary people to locate comfortable transportation to where their cancer treatments were. Blum and Weinberg formed Corporate Angel Network in 1981, a nonprofit organization that matches those empty seats with patients who need rides to far-off treatment centers.

  Ida Van Smith fulfilled her dream of flight well into her career as a teacher, which inevitably led her to aviation education. She produced a coloring book designed to give children a piece of aviation history, hosted a weekly TV program for children, and taught an introduction to aviation college course. As a black woman who understood children of poverty and their sometimes limited career motivation, Van Smith founded the Ida Van Smith Flight Clubs in 1967, exposing youngsters to careers in aviation and space. She delighted in giving the children their first airplane ride and watching their enlightened awareness of life and careers outside their own, limited arena.

  FLIGHT INSTRUCTION

  The base for all of aviation, without whom there is no need for aircraft manufacturers, agricultural aviation, Air Force One, fighter jets, commercial transportation system, or the exploration of space, is the flight instructor. The person who met that youngster with dreams of flight at the airport fence and taught her to fly. Women have excelled in the flight instructor ranks. They’re patient. They’re loyal. They see their students through tough times. They’re willing to work for less pay. They love the satisfaction of teaching.

  Evelyn Bryan Johnson became the highest fly time pilot in the United States. In her fifty-five years of flying, she logged nearly fifty-seven thousand flight hours. She achieved this by flying students all day, every day—even at ninety years of age. She received countless recognitions from her peers: Flight Instructor of the Year, Elder Statesman Award, induction into various halls of fame, and the Carnegie Award (for saving a pilot from a burning helicopter). But her true legacy is the army of more than two thousand students populating every aspect of aviation today.

  Gerda Ruhnke was born to German parents, though she never lived in that country. She grew up in Montevideo, Uruguay. When she married and moved to the United States, Ruhnke started a flight training operation in a small trainer at the Washington Dulles Airport, of all places. Knowing her unmistakable accent, the tower often called her by name instead of her aircraft number.

  She died in the most bizarre of circumstances on an instruction flight. She was a small woman and had been booked to give a first flight to quite a large man. As the details evolved, it turned out that the man was intent upon suicide in an airplane, and took this stranger with him, overpowering her and her ability to control the airplane. Ruhnke’s Washington, DC, Ninety-Nines chapter honored her with a perpetual Amelia Earhart scholarship in her name.

  THAT SLIPPERY WORD “FIRST”

  Aeronaut Connie Wolf flew for more than sixty years and, at one point, was pronounced by the FAA the oldest active female pilot in the country. Age aside, Wolf’s love of ballooning expressed her deepest feelings of patriotism. To commemorate Philadelphia’s tricentennial, she designed a balloon bearing the likeness of William Penn and flew it from Penn’s Landing, Philadelphia, to New Jersey. Wolf donated the $20,000 balloon to the Franklin Institute. The institute’s namesake surely would have approved. Legend has it that Ben Franklin had witnessed a balloon flight in Paris in 1783 and was asked, “Of what use is it?” To that, Dr. Franklin replied, “Of what use, sir, is a newborn baby?”

  Connie Wolf once piloted a balloon over Paris and London to promote Mike Todd’s movie Around the World in 80 Days. In 1962, Wolf became the first woman to pilot a hydrogen balloon over the Alps from Switzerland to Italy. She received the Montogolfier Diploma, the first American woman to hold this highest of ballooning honors.

  Loftia El-Nadi was the first Arab woman to throw off the veil and learn to fly. She soloed in a Gypsy Moth in Cairo and received Egyptian pilot license number thirty-four in 1933. It was considered a dishonor for Egyptian women of a certain class to work, but El-Nadi decided that she would not tolerate the subjugation and would try to make something of her life. Working as a secretary for a flight school, she slowly paid for her lessons. Though she flew only five years before medical problems ended her flying, Loftia El-Nadi competed in air races, learned aerobatics, and served as an icon to other women of her heritage and era.

  Jeana Yeager was the copilot of the experimental aircraft Voyager during record-breaking distance flights. In July of 1986, Yeager and pilot Dick Rutan established a closed-course endurance record for unrefueled flight. However, the flight covering 11,857 miles in more than 111 hours was only a warm-up for the “main event,” which came later that year.

  In the last week of 1986, Yeager and Rutan landed at Edwards Air Force Base in California after completing a nine-day, twenty-six thousand mile, nonstop flight around the world in the Voyager airplane, truly a flying fuel tank with long, glider wings. The flight was accomplished without refueling en route, thus becoming the first plane to circumnavigate the world without refueling. Conditions during the flight were changing constantly, as the crew dealt with inclement weather en route, various mechanical problems, and the discomfort of two people confined for nine days in a noisy cockpit described as the size of a telephone booth.

  Yeager, Rutan, and the Voyager team received numerous recognitions for their astonishing flight, but perhaps the most prestigious was the 1986 Collier Trophy, one of the most coveted aeronautical honors in America. Yeager was the first woman ever listed on the Collier. The Voyager airplane is now the first thing a visitor sees upon entering the lobby of the Smithsonian’s Air and Space Museum.

  SPACE

  Back in the late fifties, an Oklahoma pilot, Jerrie Cobb, was flying for the Aero Commander Company. The Russian and American astronaut programs were just gathering steam when an aerospace medicine specialist, Dr. Randolph Lovelace, became curious about the possibility of including a woman astronaut in the U.S. program. As the fifties drew to a close, he asked Jerrie Cobb to take the astronaut tests, which she agreed to in a heartbeat. Cobb did so well that Dr. Lovelace invited a whole group to test, and thirteen women pilots passed his physical exams. Coincidently, when NASA and the Mercury astronauts got wind of Dr. Lovelace’s program, it was instantly terminated. Jerrie Cobb took her special flying talent to the Amazon jungle and flew medicines and doctors to the indigenous peoples of the Amazon for nearly forty
years. For this, she was nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize.

  It was twenty years before a group of women joined the space program as astronauts, and they were highly qualified scientists, engineers, and physicians. Though they learned to fly airplanes, they were not selected primarily as pilots.

  Sally Ride made the breakthrough as the first American woman in space, though Valentina Terashkova, a Russian sport parachutist, had flown in space first. Finally, Lieutenant Colonel Eileen Collins, an air force test pilot, was assigned to be a shuttle pilot, and other female astronaut shuttle pilots followed. As she became shuttle commander, Collins was quick to point out that she didn’t just one day appear in the left seat of the most sophisticated air machine ever built. She said, “Everything I ever learned—every flight instructor I ever flew with, every airplane I ever flew, and every airport I ever flew into—has come together in my job today. The ultimate test pilot job is to be an astronaut.”

  Donna Shirley, who grew up in Wynnewood, Oklahoma, entered the university at seventeen and quickly gathered a string of pilot ratings. Her primary interest in aviation turned to engineering, though in her college days in the late fifties she had been counseled that girls couldn’t be engineers. She did anyway. Later, as a thirty-year veteran at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, Shirley worked on varied space projects, one of the most exciting being the design of the miniature rover to explore Mars, the Mars Sojourner Rover. Soon, Shirley headed up the entire Mars exploration program, and hers was the happy face we all saw on television signaling the successful probe of a neighboring planet.