Sky Girls

by Gene Nora Jessen

  SUNDAY, AUGUST 18, 1929

  Race Day 1

  EVENING, SAN BERNARDINO

  The “she derby” got off the ground and away in the air, and what is humorously referred to as the stronger sex went back to the kitchen sink and the radio. The husbands left by motor to go ahead and prepare proper food for their wives in each town. I tried to find a mother in the outfit. There was so many Mrs. I thought I might find one wayward soul. But all had no time for maternal worries. They had given their lives to the carburetors.

  Yours, Will Rogers

  Syndicated newspaper column

  After cleaning up their aircraft and spending a few minutes with their sponsors, husbands, and mechanics (sometimes all three were the same person), the competitors were whisked off to what was to become the toughest part of the race—the banquets.

  Their San Bernardino hosts would provide what was to become standard hospitality each evening of the race. The excited locals entertained their guests with a formal banquet, complete with fresh flowers and formal attire, though there seemed to be some unspoken rule at each stop that the entrée had to be chicken. To save weight, the racers didn’t carry many clothes, pulling out their one wrinkled, dress-up frock for a long evening of dining, speeches, and small talk with their hosts. The evenings dragged on—first speeches and entertainment, then in San Bernardino, a movie titled The Flying Fool, starring the flying of their comrade Pancho Barnes. Barnes facetiously denied that the title referred to her, while her cohorts applauded loudly, proud of Barnes’s success in the movies.

  It was past midnight before the contestants finally met to discuss the next day’s events. The racers unanimously agreed that the evening entertainment combined with the late-night pilot meetings then a predawn wakeup call was excessively brutal. Without adequate rest, their sleep debt would compound.

  Monday’s route would be 144 miles to Calexico for a stop, then another 204 miles to Phoenix for the night. The racers who had flown the course backward en route to the start in Santa Monica were concerned about the Calexico stop. They thought the airfield was too short for the heavier aircraft. It was an unnecessarily dangerous stop when Yuma was an easy and close substitute. Barnes, whose plane was one of the heavies, led the revolt, demanding that Yuma be substituted for Calexico. Their hastily prepared petition read: “We, the undersigned, pilots in the Women’s Air Derby, hereby declare we will go not farther than this point (San Bernardino) unless routed by or through Yuma instead of Calexico.”

  The women also drafted and signed a second petition allowing Mary Haizlip to compete, despite the delay waiting for her airplane in Santa Monica. The petition, dated August 19, read: “We, the undersigned pilots of the Women’s Air Derby from Santa Monica to Cleveland do hereby wholeheartedly consent to the entrance of May Haizlys (sic) in this event, her start to be made this date from Santa Monica.” They either didn’t consider that the timers had already left Santa Monica or just decided to let the race officials work that out.

  Their insistence was supported in part by anger that they had not been furnished with a definite routing until a few hours before takeoff. Some had already arranged for fuel in Yuma, and Thea Rasche had forwarded aircraft parts to Yuma, believing the race would stop there.

  At 2:00 a.m., local race committee chairman Dr. L. W. Ayers flatly refused to allow any deviation from course and announced that those so doing would be disqualified. The final authority, Floyd Logan, the air race chairman in Cleveland, had cleverly left his telephone off the hook. It looked like a showdown until someone eventually roused him. Logan allowed the pilots a compromise. The en route landing could be in Yuma, but all racers were required to fly over and be identified at Calexico. At 2:30 a.m., the racers finally went to bed for two hours’ sleep in anticipation of their 6:00 a.m. departure. Some stayed up even later reworking their charts.

  Petition to allow Mary Haizlip to compete in the derby.

  Only the Daily Sun reporters got less sleep than the pilots. Their impressions filled the front page of Monday’s paper:

  In the light plane class, Bobbi Trout, a trim young girl with a daredevil look in her eye, finished second in an elapsed time of thirty-six minutes and twenty-three seconds. Mrs. Keith-Miller, flying a Fleet plane in the light class, completely lost her bearings near the end of her jaunt and went clear to Redlands before she discovered her mistake. She could have made it about as quickly in an automobile.

  Actually, Redlands was only a ten-mile overshoot. Chubbie Keith-Miller had either wandered further than that, wasn’t flying with full power, or had a really slow airplane—or she wasn’t volunteering exactly where she’d been. She’d averaged fifty-six miles per hour. By comparison, Bobbi Trout had made good at 113 miles per hour.

  Amelia Earhart, flying a big Lockheed monoplane, finished eleventh (sic) in an elapsed time of forty-three minutes flat. Amelia, sometimes known as the “Lady Lindy,” had a lot of hard luck at the start, and had to turn back to Clover Field soon after the takeoff because of motor trouble. She furnished another thrill when she overshot the runway in landing, causing the crowds to jump hither and yon looking for something to crawl under.

  Opal Kunz pancaked her ship about ten feet above the ground and crashed, wrecking the undercarriage. But Miss Kunz’ mishap brought out some of the prettiest flying feats seen during the afternoon. Coming into the field directly behind Miss Kunz when the accident occurred was Miss Neva Paris of Great Neck, New York in a Curtiss Robin Challenger plane. Miss Kunz’ plane bogged down right in the middle of the runway, and, swerving her ship, Miss Paris came in diagonally at high speed and managed to set her craft down perfectly, despite the handicap.

  Women may be fliers, but they’re just women after all. This was conclusively demonstrated yesterday as one by one the pilots landed and were summoned to have their pictures taken. “Just a minute,” was the invariable response. Then out came compact boxes and lipsticks and only after their application would the girls consent to face the camera.

  “This is the first real test of women’s ability to fly,” said pretty Ruth Elder, who tried to fly the Atlantic, fell into the ocean and later into the movies.

  The women rejected being lumped together, insisting that Ruth Elder was the compact queen.

  The en route press coverage was colorful and as accurate as could be expected on the fly. Reporters didn’t necessarily know much about airplanes, especially with women flying them. The racers learned to count on and look forward to Will Rogers’s daily national column to relate their adventure in his down-home humor, with a true understanding of their mission and appreciation for their quest to be considered serious aviators. Rogers could skewer the politicians in his sly hillbilly style and simultaneously support aviation and the pilots he admired. The women were glad he and Wiley Post were along with them, and treasured their friendship.

  Amelia Earhart and Mary Von Mach were well down in the standings the first day due to their unplanned stops en route. Neva Paris and Vera Dawn Walker had not made good time in their Curtiss Robins. The Robins had already revealed themselves as slow airplanes, and Paris and Walker were to lag throughout the race.

  Vera Dawn Walker

  Tiny Vera Dawn Walker had been working in the movies as an extra and a stand-in for Tom Mix. The cowboy actor loved flying and talked her into going for an airplane ride, leaving her amazed that she loved it. Walker became determined to learn to fly. She finally found a flight school that would take on an under-one-hundred-pound, four-foot-eleven-inch student, only upon her guarantee to release them of all liability. She heard about and signed up for the air derby as a pilot with eight months’ experience.

  Movie mogul Howard Hughes encouraged Walker to fly, but he agreed that she needed more flying hours before taking on a cross-country race. She was already working two jobs, one in the movies and one selling real estate, to pay for her flying. Hughes supported her successful search for a company to give her a little experimental “racing job” in which she could
both prefly the race and gain some experience.

  Howard Hughes (left) and Roscoe Turner

  Total logged flying hours were a strong indicator of flying knowledge, though the definition varied. Some pilots spent a lot of time in the traffic pattern, doing what the Brits colorfully called circuits and bumps. It meant going ’round and ’round the airport practicing takeoffs and landings. Other pilots logged more flying hours actually going somewhere—learning navigation, terrain, weather, and density altitude firsthand. Obviously, the latter would prove important in the Women’s Air Derby, and Walker’s aviation mentors saw that she was as well prepared as her limited flying time allowed.

  Walker’s little borrowed racer proved unreliable while she was building flying hours prior to the air derby. Engine trouble led to a forced landing on unsuitable terrain. The only flat surface within gliding distance as the engine gave up the ghost was soft sand, where she dug in, nosed over, and broke three ribs—hers, not the airplane’s. She would fly the race with her ribs taped—shades of Chuck Yeager who years later broke the sound barrier with ribs taped.

  Walker’s fabric and wood airplane had been quickly repaired, as was often the case in 1929, and she hurried to be ready for the start of the race. Her troubles were compounded when her repaired airplane didn’t pass inspection at the start. It was not legally airworthy. The Curtiss-Wright Corporation was holding a competition to select a pilot to sponsor. Walker hurriedly competed against a dozen other girls flying a much bigger ship than she was used to and prevailed. She was awarded a Curtiss Robin in which to race the air derby. The company included the required parachute, with Walker learning later that the oversized chute was usually reserved for Charles Lindbergh. In her spirited fashion, the pint-size pilot displayed gallon-size guts.

  Two sets of race timers flew the route also, leap-frogging to keep ahead of the competitors. Just as soon as all the race airplanes were off in Santa Monica, those timers jumped into a race official’s airplane headed straight for Calexico, skipping San Bernardino. Wiley Post and Will Rogers carried a load of racers’ luggage to Cleveland, but their primary task was to pick up the San Bernardino timers and deliver them to Yuma after the last airplane departed their first race stop, then on to Douglas while the first group timed Phoenix, and so on. The timer airplanes could stay ahead of the racers since they could fly direct, without the interim stop. Since the racers departed each new day (except the last) in the reverse order of their arrival, it kept them closely bunched, convenient for the timers, press, and arrival crowds. This method of timing explained why racers who fell behind but elected to finish the race anyway, went on untimed. The timers had to keep moving and couldn’t wait for stragglers.

  The press at San Bernardino mobbed Phoebe Omlie and Pancho Barnes, leaders in their respective classes. Omlie was quoted as saying, “Just before I reached the line, I nosed my plane down with the motor wide open. I was hitting about 130 miles per hour, I believe.”

  A happy Barnes said, “It’s some feeling to have arrived first. I’m sure glad my ‘whoopee’ made such good time. From the time I hopped off at Clover Field until I arrived here, I never saw any of the other contestants, and here’s hoping I get to Cleveland in the same position.” To add to the festivities at San Bernardino, a squadron of army airplanes from March Field demonstrated military maneuvers. A powerful broadcast system with microphones at the finish line and amplifiers strategically placed kept the crowds informed.

  In the skies elsewhere, the giant airship Graf Zeppelin, with its forty crew members and twenty passengers, was floating silently over the islands of Japan six hundred miles from Tokyo, moving steadily toward its immediate destination. It was on an around-the-world flight from and to Germany, the Cleveland Air Races a must-stop on the itinerary. The Kamui Lighthouse on the southwest coast of Hokkaido Island radioed weather conditions of fog and rain as the Graf altered course due to the weather, continuing at sixty miles per hour. The Zeppelin’s dogleg passage over the Tartar Straits was necessary to avoid the Manchuria district with Russian and Chinese troops engaged in battle. The citizens of Tokyo grasped at any news of the great German dirigible’s imminent arrival.

  Although the Graf’s aerodynamic engineering was imperfect, that didn’t interfere with the purpose of the world flight that generated intense public interest, including that of bankers who agreed to finance four more dirigibles. The plan was to run two ships each way across the Atlantic weekly carrying mail and freight. The Goodyear-Zeppelin partnership planned to later run ships across the Pacific to Hawaii and the Philippines.

  There was other world news: the bullish stock market was soaring to new price records with “steel, communications, and chemical shares raging unchecked.” From the Holy Land: “Thirty-eight were killed in rioting over worship at the Wailing Wall.” The women’s accomplishments were news, but the world did not hold still.

  FIRST LEG STANDINGS

  SANTA MONICA TO SAN BERNARDINO, 68 MILES

  Light Planes

  RACE # CONTESTANT ELAPSED TIME AIRCRAFT & ENGINE

  8 Phoebe Omlie 32:15 Monocoupe, Warner

  100 Bobbi Trout 36:23 Golden Eagle, Kinner

  54 Claire Fahy 44:11 Travel Air, OX5

  61 Thea Rasche 46:30 Gypsy Moth, DH Gypsy

  109 Edith Foltz 52:55 Eaglerock, Kinner

  43 Chubbie Keith-Miller 1:12:59 Fleet, Kinner K5

  Heavy Planes

  RACE # CONTESTANT ELAPSED TIME AIRCRAFT & ENGINE

  2 Pancho Barnes 27:21 Travel Air, Wright J5

  4 Louise Thaden 27:50 Travel Air, Wright J5

  105 Gladys O’Donnell 25:19 Waco 10, Wright, J5

  1 Marvel Crosson 29:23 Travel Air, Wright J5

  3 Blanche Noyes 31:15 Travel Air, Wright J5

  16 Ruth Nichols 32:50 Rearwin, Ken-Royce

  66 Ruth Elder 34:40 Swallow, Wright J5

  18 Opal Kunz 38:36 Travel Air, Challenger

  11 Margaret Perry 40:19 Spartan, Wright J5

  23 Neva Paris 41:22 Curtiss Robin, Chlnger

  6 Amelia Earhart 43:00 Lockheed Vega, Wrt J5

  113 Vera Dawn Walker 51:04 Curtiss Robin, Chlnger

  5 Mary Von Mach not available Travel Air, Wright J5

  76 Mary Haizlip not yet started Amer Eagle, Phantom J6

  MONDAY, AUGUST 19, 1929

  Race Day 2

  SAN BERNARDINO TO CALEXICO TO YUMA

  220 MILES, 165 MILES

  Biggest news in the papers today was that Colonel Lindbergh had won the horseshoe pitching contest out in the Black Hills of Virginia, at Camp Hoover. What’s the matter with this country when an aviator can walk off with a horseshoe pitching test? Is there no limit to this man’s cleverness?

  Yours, Will Rogers

  Syndicated newspaper column

  As the women arrived at the airport predawn, people were already out, wiping bugs off wing leading edges and the last traces of oil that had collected under the planes’ dirty bellies. Many were unknown to the racers, simply citizens who wanted to be helpful and were curious about the race. The women were wary about men helping them and were a little embarrassed about their ambivalence toward their generous volunteers. They wanted to make a statement of their own and resented the hurdles the other sex created for women in aviation. They began talking of meeting at Cleveland following the race and forming some sort of organization for women pilots so they could network for jobs.

  Takeoffs that morning were in reverse order of the previous day’s landings, putting Vera Dawn Walker off first and Phoebe Omlie last. Louise Thaden was only twenty-nine seconds behind Pancho Barnes. Those Travel Airs were the ships to have! Today’s legs were much longer than the day before, and the group would undoubtedly spread out more.

  Some racers were fueling out of their personal supply of the new Shell aviation gasoline. The U.S. Army was experimenting with assorted gasolines. For some time, pistons stressed for higher compression had increased airspeed by boosting horsepower, but the pistons quickly burned out
. The army learned that the Pennsylvania gasolines were high in paraffin content with a low knock rating that burned pistons rapidly. The California gasolines, high in aromatics, had a high knock rating, and they were kinder to higher-compressioned pistons. A few racers were lucky enough to have some of the new Shell California 100 octane aviation gasoline shipped to each air derby stop.

  Ruth Elder came over to Louise Thaden in an agitated state. “Those so-called mechanics they so kindly provided for us might delay my takeoff indefinitely,” she said.

  “What’s happened?” Thaden asked, as she looked over at Elder’s two-place open-cockpit biwing Swallow. Mechanics were draining its fuel tanks.

  “They put five gallons of oil in the gas tank. Those guys are either terminally stupid or brain-dead.” Elder was too irritated to stand still and stomped over to the next racer to vent her anger.

  Thaden immediately thought of Thea Rasche’s warning of sabotage. But it couldn’t be. Had it been intentional? Probably not. Anyone would know the pilot would check the fuel and catch the discrepancy. Still, everyone was a bit paranoid. Some women didn’t know who to doubt more—men or each other. Thaden reloaded her small overnight bag along with her required food supply. She had chosen to bring malted milk tablets and beef jerky.

  A crowd was gathering around Edith Foltz’s Alexander Bullet. The plane’s appearance was quite radical alongside the other aircraft in the lineup. Few people had seen a low-wing ship like hers, with the landing gear actually retracted up into the wings after takeoff. Some folks looked askance at such a different airplane, but there was no doubt of its speed. The factory had had serious flat spin problems in their test program, giving the airplane a questionable safety reputation. An airplane spinning with the nose pointed down was almost always in a recoverable maneuver. However, when the Bullet got into a flat or horizontal spin, as a toy top spins, sometimes the pilot could not get the spin to stop and the airplane “spun in,” or spun to the ground. In fact, the Bullet had not yet been awarded a type certificate by the government and was in the experimental category. (This model aircraft never did receive a standard certificate, which restricted its use. In defense of the Bullet, its design was innovative and progressive—a major step forward in aeronautical engineering.)