Sky Girls

by Gene Nora Jessen

  Ruth Nichols always believed that had her papers been processed expeditiously, she, rather than Phoebe Omlie, would have been the country’s first female transport pilot. A law passed making tracking and numbering pilots’ credentials a regional obligation. Unfortunately, it ensured that dates would always be questioned and challenged. Be that as it may, Ruth Nichols had soloed a seaplane in 1923, then she was licensed as the second female transport pilot. Ruth Nichols and Phoebe Omlie would continue to be nemeses.

  Their mechanic licenses were a different matter. The two women took the mechanic’s test on the same day, and they obviously should have numbered one and two. An official Department of Commerce investigation determined that even though Phoebe Omlie held mechanic license number 422 and Ruth Nichols number 401, Phoebe was actually licensed first, purely by chance.

  With licensing, it became easier for pilots to locate other pilots. In 1927, Nichols had received a letter from Amelia Earhart suggesting a formal organization of the country’s twenty-one women aviators. Earhart said, “Personally, I am a social worker, but fly for sport. I cannot claim to be a feminist but do rather enjoy seeing women tackling all kinds of new problems.” Nichols responded in the affirmative.

  Earhart’s letter suggested several categories of membership: “[Fédération Aéronautique Internationale] for inactive flyers such as Katharine Stinson, active transport or private operators, and those in administrative capacities in recognized aeronautical concerns. They would also establish an associate membership category for any women who would like to boost aviation.” As it turned out, membership in the Ninety-Nines two years later was restricted to licensed female pilots only.

  After Nichol’s encounter with the steamroller during the 1929 Women’s Air Derby, her luck took a turn for the better. Obtaining sponsorship from Powell Crosley Jr., president of Crosley Radio Corporation, Nichols flew record flights in the big Lockheed Vega with its nine-cylinder 400-horsepower engine and CROSLEY painted in big gold letters along the fuselage. She set a transcontinental speed record for women in 1930—Roosevelt Field, Long Island to Los Angeles in sixteen hours and fifty-nine minutes, then back in thirteen hours and twenty minutes. Headlines the next morning read: “Ruth Nichols spans nation, beats Lindbergh.”

  Ruth Nichols

  Early in 1931, Nichols’s mentor and advisor Clarence Chamberlin stripped all the extraneous weight such as extra seats and door handles from the Vega to facilitate her climb for an altitude record. The already-powerful engine was supercharged, and a special climb propeller was installed. Nichols dressed in multiple layers of clothing and fur boots, preparing for the cold, and she quickly climbed to altitude. Chamberlin had rigged up a primitive oxygen system to keep Nichols’s brain alive when she climbed above twenty thousand feet. The oxygen cleared her head, but with an outside air temperature of forty-five degrees below zero, the oxygen froze her tongue. As the airplane’s rate of climb started to deteriorate around twenty-eight thousand feet, Nichols implemented Chamberlin’s ace in the hole, an oxygen line feeding directly to the engine air intake for a last burst of power. Her altimeter read 30,350 feet before the airplane gave up and started down. When the sealed barograph was read on the ground, her official record altitude was 28,743 feet.

  Unable to leave well enough alone, and with Nichols’s push, of course, Chamberlin next uprated the Wasp engine to 600 horsepower and further streamlined the Vega’s airframe for a speed record attempt. Sure enough, 210.685 miles per hour set a new women’s speed record, thirty miles per hour above Amelia Earhart’s previous record. To become the first woman pilot to fly solo across the Atlantic was her next goal. Crossing the big pond was a still-unfulfilled record ready for a taker.

  Nichols flew her borrowed Lockheed Vega named Akita, an Indian word meaning explore or discover, to St. John’s, Newfoundland, in June 1931, an intermediate stop prior to her starting point for Europe. Upon arrival in St. John’s, she realized the landing strip was too short, and at the last moment on her approach, added power for a go-around for a second try. But her attempt at recovery came too late. Nichols left her landing gear in the treetops, and the big Lockheed crashed through the trees and boulders, shedding airplane parts along the way. Though badly injured, Nichols was desperately afraid of fire, and dragged herself out of the airplane. The accident and severe injury ended her challenge to Amelia Earhart. Nevertheless, the Fédération Aéronautique Internationale named Ruth Nichols the outstanding U.S. pilot for 1931. In 1932, Ruth Nichols joined the long line of women purported to be the first female airline pilot in America when she flew the inaugural flight for Clarence Chamberlin’s new airline, New York and New England Airways. Years later, that claim generated an appearance on the television program To Tell the Truth as the first woman airline pilot in the United States. Ultimately, the Federal Aviation Administration denied the claim.

  Nichols endured six major accidents in her aviation career, including numerous aborted record-flight attempts. The trusty Vega was finally destroyed, after multiple rebuilds, on a grossly overloaded takeoff with enough fuel for a nonstop transcontinental flight. As another world war approached and her record flights ended, Nichols turned to humanitarian causes, just as other early women pilots had and her Quaker ancestry demanded. In 1940, she founded Relief Wings to support civilian disasters. When World War II did come and civilian flying was curtailed, Nichols’s Relief Wings was melded into the Civil Air Patrol, and she continued her service through that organization.

  Ruth Nichols

  Appointed as a special volunteer correspondent for UNICEF, Nichols served as a “courtesy extra pilot” on a ’round-the-world UNICEF fact-gathering flight in a DC-4. They made stops across Asia as Nichols carefully reported progress in the feeding and care of needy children. Completing her surveys, she left that flight for alternative transportation out of Rome, headed for home. Unbelievably, her airplane crossing the north Atlantic was forced to ditch in the ocean, and exiting the sinking airplane, she spent the night in a life raft. After rescue and return home by air via Ireland, and in absolute disbelief in how she accomplished it, Nichols was recognized as the first woman to complete a globe-circling flight.

  When Nichols’s friend and rival Amelia Earhart was lost in 1937, Nichols’s omniscient comments were: “If it must come, this was a fitting end to a flyer’s career—to disappear at the peak of fame, on a final glorious attempt to conquer new frontiers of the sky; never to know the erosions and disappointments of age; to live on in memory as young, golden, and unafraid.” Ruth Nichols continued to fly all her life and died at age fifty-nine in 1960.

  Blanche Wilcox Noyes commented at the end of the race on the public’s lavish interest in the Women’s Air Derby. “I think I’ve autographed everything but flypaper,” she exclaimed. She described her en route rough landing as “one of the most inexcusable and foolish things a person can do. I had my eyes open and my brain tight shut.” The Cleveland crowds loved their hometown girl.

  An actress, Noyes learned to fly from her dashing airmail pilot husband, Dewey, shortly before the race. She jumped into aviation with both feet and stayed there for life. In 1930, Blanche and Dewey took ninety-year-old John D. Rockefeller for his first and only airplane ride.

  In 1932, Noyes flew the Pitcairn autogyro for Standard Oil Company. This machine combined conventional fixed-wing with vertical takeoff, rotary-wing concepts. The autogyro involved a free-turning rotor for lift and a conventional tractor engine and propeller for forward thrust. Spanish designer Juan de la Cierva had worked out the principle that was then further developed and expanded by Harold Pitcairn in the United States. Pitcairn’s concept was that the autogyro would become an affordable, easy-to-fly, mass-market aircraft, and he envisioned them as common as automobiles. Although Pitcairn won the Collier Trophy in 1930 for his achievement and furthered the later development of the practical helicopter, the autogyro suffered excessive accidents and never sold well in the marketplace. Nevertheless, it was pretty impressive t
o see this tiny woman, big grin on her face, climb out of the large, unwieldy ship.

  In 1936, Noyes was Louise Thaden’s copilot, winning the Bendix Air Race from New York to Los Angeles against both men and women. In the same year, and for thirty-five years thereafter, Noyes worked in the government’s air-marking program, supervising the construction of seventy-five thousand air markers across the country. Before the era of the modern navigational radio, pilots depended upon identification markers on the ground to supplement their navigation skills. Her employer called Noyes a “champion of safety.” As soon as the program got up and running, World War II broke out. The markers along the coasts were removed for fear they would be helpful to enemy planes. After the war, they were reinstalled.

  Blanche Noyes

  Noyes was the recipient of many awards and honors. One colorful writer wrote that Blanche Noyes’s experiences “increased the stature of her soul.”

  Having known Noyes during her FAA years, I can testify that she never failed to fulfill her fun quotient. She particularly enjoyed her Watergate address during its notorious Nixon years. Charter Ninety-Nine Blanche Noyes died at age eighty-one in 1981.

  Gladys Berry O’Donnell’s second-place win in the 1929 Women’s Air Derby whetted her racing appetite. Although she had flown only forty-six hours prior to the derby, she was the winner of the 1930 event. O’Donnell was a ferocious competitor in the pylon races and was awarded the Aerol Trophy by the National Aeronautic Association (NAA) in 1930. She was considered the outstanding woman flyer of the year. She was a natural, winning $8,800 in prize money that Depression year and twenty-nine subsequent competitive events, usually flying her Taperwing Waco (which was streamlined to the limit), all while rearing two children.

  Gladys O’Donnell

  O’Donnell started a club of the 1929 Women’s Air Derby pilots called the Skylarks. But as the Ninety-Nines developed, those members became charter Ninety-Nines and the Skylarks were absorbed. O’Donnell, who was from Southern California, acted as the first governor of the Ninety-Nines’ Southwest Section.

  Gladys and her husband, Lloyd, operated a flying school in Long Beach, California, for which Gladys instructed. Gladys became an early movie pilot. She was a champion of women’s rights, and her later years were devoted to Republican politics, beating Phyllis Schlafly for President of the National Federation of Republican Women in 1968. Gladys O’Donnell died at age sixty-nine in 1973.

  Phoebe Fairgrave Omlie topped her victory in the Women’s’ Air Derby by winning the Dixie Derby in 1930. She won the $3,000 purse, and a glamorous Cord automobile, by flying her Monocoupe, Miss Memphis, in the 1931 National Sweepstakes Race. With this leg up, Phoebe and her husband, Vernon, left barnstorming and racing behind, and settled into “serious” flying in Memphis. The glamorous couple was the toast of Memphis. They loved to dance in the Peabody Hotel ballroom where the spotlight would pick out the tall, handsome Vernon and his tiny wife, Phoebe, as they entered.

  The Depression forced the Omlies to sell the majority interest in their business, and Phoebe became more involved in politics. Flying the campaign trail in 1932 for President Roosevelt led to an unprecedented governmental appointment for Phoebe, the first woman appointee in aviation, with the title Special Assistant for Air Intelligence on the National Advisory Committee for Aeronautics. In her position, Omlie was responsible for air marking. Louise Thaden and Blanche Noyes worked with her, Noyes staying on for over thirty years.

  Omlie introduced another first: Vocational education in the Memphis public schools. Eleanor Roosevelt called Phoebe Omlie one of the “eleven women whose achievements make it safe to say the world is progressing.”

  Vernon Omlie taught author William Faulkner and his brother Dean to fly. The Faulkners became so enamored of barnstorming that they flew themselves, and wrote of it. Faulkner’s novel Pylon included the thinly disguised Omlies.

  Phoebe Omlie

  Tragically, Vernon died in 1936 as a passenger on an airline’s botched instrument approach in fog. Phoebe lived another nearly forty years, reduced by illness to poverty and self-imposed isolation. William Faulkner understood her not wanting to be remembered as she was at the end of her life. She was part of a bygone era. He said sadly, “There was really no place for (barnstormers) in the culture…everybody knew that they wouldn’t last, which they didn’t.” Phoebe died at age seventy-two in 1975.

  Neva Finlay Paris took action after the gathering under the grandstands at the end of the derby. The women were determined to organize, and Paris was the detail person who pulled it all together. She declared they would “promote good fellowship among licensed women pilots, encourage flying among women, and create opportunities for women in commercial aviation.”

  Neva Paris

  Paris signed a joint letter along with Frances Harrel, Margery Brown, and Fay Gillis Wells, to all the then 117 U.S. female pilots, of which ninety-nine eventually chartered the group. Consensus was to name the organization after the number of charter members at the postmark deadline date. Newspaper accounts of the women pilots’ group, as it was in process, referred to it variously as the 86s, the 97s, and finally the 99s, or the Ninety-Nines. And so, it was.

  Paris’s enthusiasm permeated the group, and plans were made for regional structure and gatherings, communication about jobs, and service to the aviation community. Two planning meetings were held and officer selection was underway. Then tragedy struck.

  Opal Kunz was to write on January 13, 1930, “It should be remembered by all of us that this club was really founded by Neva.” Paris had just been killed in a spin at Woodbine, Georgia, en route to Miami.

  Margaret Gilbert Perry recovered from the typhoid-fever attack suffered during the race, and she migrated to California to operate an airport in Culver City; she was probably one of the first women in the country to manage an airport. Some thirty women pilots wearing their white flying outfits flew in for the dedication of the airport. There, in California, she married Larry Cooper, a movie-stunt pilot who also flew for Texaco Oil Company.

  Margaret Perry

  Perry was always active in the Ninety-Nines, with membership in the southwest growing from seventeen to ninety-six while she was governor of the section. Margaret helped found the popular magazine Airwoman.

  Later, bringing tales of women’s adventures, employment, and competition opportunities to a broader audience, she returned to her home state of New York and married Harold Manser. Perhaps her most fulfilling Ninety-Nines project was involvement with a fitting tribute to Amelia Earhart as trustee of the Amelia Earhart Memorial Scholarship program. Perry’s life was one of constant service until her death in 1951.

  Thea Rasche, known as Germany’s “Flying Fraulein,” returned home to Europe following the derby to qualify in seaplanes (a first) and gliders. Rasche was forced to sell her airplane upon the Nazi rise to power, and she became editor of an aviation magazine. She crewed with two Dutch pilots on a DC-2 flying the eleven-thousand-mile Mac Robertson Air Race from England to Australia, took first place, and was the only woman to finish the race. Unfortunately, the event cost Rasche her editing job, and her three books were banned after charges of “too much sympathy for the Anglo-American enemies.”

  Thea Rasche

  Rasche joined the Nazi party hoping to continue flying, spending the war years in Berlin. She was later tried in 1947 in the United States for her Nazi activities. It was ironic that she was penalized both for her American sympathies and also for Nazi loyalties. She was cleared in the German court, due to a lack of evidence that her pilot skills had affected the war effort. Interestingly, Rasche was one of only three female honorary members of the low-profile men’s aviation group, the Quiet Birdmen. Quotable Rasche said that “sex bombs are as dangerous as atom bombs,” and flying was “more thrilling than love for a man and far less dangerous.” She died at age seventy-two in 1971.

  Louise Thaden was among the women who gathered under the grandstands post-derby. Like the others, s
he was determined to develop a formal advocacy group composed of women pilots. At that time, it was all but impossible for the women to secure jobs in their chosen field, and the power of an association made sense to all. Neva Paris became the temporary chairman of the group, but her death en route to the air races in Florida sent the new club into turmoil. Louise Thaden took over as secretary and ran things informally for the first several years. Though asked to serve as president, Thaden stepped aside, insisting that Amelia Earhart was better known and would be a better spokesman for the group. She served as Earhart’s vice president after the Ninety-Nines’ first formal election in 1931.

  Thaden flew her Travel Air 4000 in the pylon races in Cleveland at the terminus of the Women’s Air Derby. It was a dangerous business. The racers lined up for a racehorse start, all headed for the scatter pylon straight ahead at which time they would turn left for a rectangular course with pylons at the four corners. The scatter pylon did just that—scattered the racers. All the racers would jockey for position at the first pylon, staying just outside the pylon—cutting inside meant the pilot would be disqualified. Everyone would stay low, about fifty feet, to be able to see that they were outside the pylon, which was also about fifty feet tall. If they climbed, the pylon was hard to see, and they could be disqualified for cutting it too close. If they did stack up, they would dive for the finish line trying to pass those ahead. Of course, this was all at full throttle, and there were collisions and deaths in pylon racing.

  Louise Thaden

  The Travel Air Model R Mystery Ship was completed only a week prior to the start of the Cleveland Air Races. The test pilot flew it at 225 miles per hour flat out, and he knew he had a winner. Doug Davis was the first to race the speed demon in an event. While zooming around the pylon course at Cleveland, Davis was afraid he’d missed the last pylon. Not wanting to be disqualified, he circled the pylon a second time and still a third. Despite all that delay, Davis won the race at an average speed of 194.96 miles per hour, the fastest speed yet recorded for a commercial airplane. Walter Beech’s goal was to beat out the army competitors—which his pilot did.