Sky Girls

by Gene Nora Jessen

  As it happened, in 1967 the airplane was finished, and Pellegreno—by then a commercial pilot with multi-engine and instrument ratings—flew the airplane around the world on the Earhart route with a crew of three.

  They dropped a wreath over Howland Island where Earhart’s voice had last been heard. Ann’s Lockheed had originally been of Canadian registry, and afterward it went home to Ottawa to be displayed by Air Canada.

  OCEAN FLYING

  A “first” can only happen once. Interestingly enough though, “first” women have had a pretty realistic perspective of their accomplishments. Amelia Earhart was quite embarrassed by the hoopla when she became the first female pilot to fly across the Atlantic—as a passenger. She hastened to fly it herself solo, becoming a real first, and often pointed out that men had already done what she was doing. Jerrie Mock said, “This is something men do all the time. It was about time a woman did it.”

  The first woman to fly solo across the Pacific was Betty Miller. She delivered a Piper Apache to Australia, which brought her the 1964 Harmon Trophy for the outstanding accomplishment by a female pilot. (She got the 1964 Harmon Trophy instead of Jerrie Mock.) Miller didn’t have a burning desire to participate in the Earhart mystique. Rather, she simply completed a business trip, putting fifty-four hours in her logbook. If sitting behind one lone engine with a propeller out front and flying across hundreds of miles of water could ever be called routine, perhaps another woman of the sixties, Louise Sacchi, made it seem so. During World War II, Sacchi had taught celestial navigation to British pilots. She longed to fly the ocean, but complained to her friend Marion Rice Hart that she couldn’t get a job ferrying airplanes because she’d never flown the ocean herself. Rice Hart said, “We can fix that.” The two women climbed into Rice Hart’s single-engine Beech Bonanza and flew across the Atlantic.

  Sacchi got a job ferrying airplanes, mostly Beeches, then formed her own company, Sacchi Air Ferry Enterprises (SAFE). She made over three hundred crossings of the both the Atlantic and Pacific Oceans, the majority of which were in single-engine airplanes. She ferried eighty-five airplanes to Spain, for which she was awarded the country’s highest medal. She passed her expertise along when she wrote a book describing how to fly across the great waters.

  And what of the woman, Marion Rice Hart, who gave Louise Sacchi her first trans-Atlantic ride? She was one of aviation’s great characters who can only be described as a little old lady from Pasadena in tennis shoes. Fashion was at the very bottom of Rice Hart’s priority list. Her father was a financier, musician, lawyer, inventor, chess expert, and president of a score of companies, including the Holland Submarine Torpedo Boat Company, which supplied the U.S. Navy with its first submarine. Her mother also was an overachiever: a musician and a physician.

  Rice Hart took a degree in chemical engineering from MIT, the school’s first female graduate, then a master’s in geology from Columbia. She started sailing in 1936. She bought a seventy-two-foot ketch that she sailed around the world for three years. When the United States entered the war, Rice Hart tried to enlist in the Coast Guard and was declined. However, the navigation book she wrote was accepted by the Coast Guard, and fifty years and several editions later was still one of their primary celestial navigation texts.

  Marion Rice Hart started flying in 1946 at the age of fifty-four, and thirty years later, she was awarded the Harmon Trophy. Her flight instructor said that to hear her give a spontaneous, off-the-cuff lecture on the properties of gasoline to students hanging around the flight school was awesome. A newspaper reporter quoted Rice Hart at the time of her seventh single-engine ocean crossing: “It’s not so remarkable,” the eighty-one-year-old flier said.

  Marion Rice Hart’s no-nonsense take on the feminist movement and Equal Rights Amendment is not really a surprise. She said, “If I can do these things, so can any woman; why do you need legislation and all that demonstration fuss? Just do it!”

  THE AIRLINES

  So, who was America’s first female airline pilot? There are so many candidates. How do you define airline or employment? Do a couple of weeks or number of passengers factor in? Aircraft weight? Number of engines? Do “regional” or “major” matter? What other countries had females flying the big birds? You can make an argument for a dozen women, but my vote goes to Emily Howell Warner, and since the Smithsonian’s Air and Space Museum displays her uniform labeled the “First U.S. Female Airline Pilot,” I’m in good company.

  Emily Howell Warner was flying light Cessna twins around the Colorado Rockies for a charter company in the sixties, paying the hardest kind of dues while learning her trade. Winter flying in non-ice-carrying airplanes, and summer flying at hot, high-altitude airports taught Howell Warner a lot about flying. However, she was quick to notice that men well below her experience level were moving into airline jobs and flying more sophisticated equipment at much higher pay. And she also noticed that there were no women in that little room facing forward in the front of the transport airplanes.

  Howell Warner started making a nuisance of herself at the head offices of Frontier Airline in Denver. She presented her application for employment. She did it again. And again, and again, and again. Finally, in 1973, Chief Pilot Johnny Myers, whose own wife Donna had been a wing walker and international president of the Ninety-Nines, couldn’t think of any reason not to hire Howell Warner since she was so overqualified compared to the male pilots they were already hiring. Not having a separate female restroom didn’t seem as important an issue as it once had.

  Howell Warner described her first days as a copilot, or first officer, in the employ of Frontier Airline. Her first day on the job was filled with friendly greetings from controllers and bouquets of roses at each stop. But soon a crusty old captain with whom she flew had three words for her on the entire flight, and those words were “don’t touch anything.”

  Emily Howell Warner’s efforts opened the door for thousands of women who followed her, running their own gauntlets.

  Though Howell Warner’s inroads captured the historical benchmark, a case can be made that Helen Richey became the United States’ first female airline pilot the last day of 1934. She was holding down the right seat of a Ford Tri-Motor for Central Airlines and had made a scheduled run on a commercial airliner from Washington to Detroit. Despite strike threats in opposition from the pilot’s association, Richey stuck it out until October 1935, at which time she resigned. Since the Bureau of Air Commerce wasn’t allowing the airline to use her in bad weather, it was time to move on. Disappointedly, she had flown less than a dozen trips in ten months’ time.

  Helen Richey proceeded to work for the government with the air marking team, flew distance and altitude records, and raced the Bendix with Amelia Earhart the same year Louise Thaden won. When war came to the UK, Richey was among the elite group of American women recruited to fly for the ATA. Sadly, when Richey was unable to obtain a flying job after the war, the frustration level took its toll, and she took her own life.

  My own experience in the early sixties, when the airlines were hiring young men anywhere they could find them, was enlightening. I was interviewing the owner of a large flight school in southern California. He had an enormous roster of students and flight instructors (and I noticed that his wife carried the heaviest load of students). I asked how he hung onto flight instructors against the predatory airline recruiters. He said, “I try to hire only two kinds of flight instructors—cripples and women, because they can’t go to the airlines.”

  The International Society Affiliation of Women Airline Pilots (ISA+21) was formed in 1978 by twenty-one female pilots who met to form a support group (shades of the Ninety-Nines nearly fifty years before). The group assists women entering the profession through their information bank, networking, and service projects. The organization keeps a master seniority list that shows Emily Howell Warner as the first female U.S. airline pilot dated January 10, 1973, with Bonnie Tiburzi two months behind her at American Airlines, and Rosella
Bjornson in Canada one month later.

  Quiet and reserved, Rosella Bjornson grew up flying on her father’s knee off the family farm in southern Alberta. And she still has her father’s same Cessna airplane today. Bjornson’s playhouse was an old Anson Mark V from World War II, which she “flew” minus wings with her dolls and sisters as passengers. She joined the majors with impeccable flying credentials, flying for Transair Limited in a Fokker F28 twin jet.

  ISA+21 also shows Durba Bannerjee flying for Indian Airlines in 1966, a good seven years before Emily Howell Warner made the breakthrough in the United States. Italy’s Fiorenza de Bernardi also predates Howell Warner. The United States was not first to open the fraternity to women.

  A fascinating and seemingly impossible combination is Tagareed Akasheh of Middle Eastern Muslim roots. She joined the Royal Jordanian Airlines in 1975, graduated from the Royal Jordanian Air Academy on the Boeing 707, and made captain two years later. Jordan’s aviation-immersed king may well have been responsible for Jordan’s forward-thinking attitude.

  Mimi Tompkins was hired by Aloha Airlines in 1979, one of the smarter moves that airline made. Tompkins was an eight-thousand-hour pilot flying the leg from Hilo to Honolulu on April 28, 1988. Without warning, a twenty-foot section of the upper fuselage separated from the aircraft at twenty-four thousand feet, leaving the two pilots flying a top-down convertible. There was no logical way the crippled airplane could continue to fly, but the strong Boeing did.

  As the wounded airplane approached the airport, witnesses couldn’t believe what they were seeing—passengers sitting out in the open, some seats hanging out in space, the wind buffeting suspended debris. Somehow, the pilots maintained their professional cool and brought the airplane to a safe landing with sixty-one injured passengers and the loss of one life—the flight attendant who was blown out of the plane as the structure failed. Tompkins was honored for “exemplary conduct under extreme duress” in the never-before-encountered emergency.

  A true airline pilot who was never “official” was Doris Langher. Hired by United Airlines in Chicago, Langher trained pilots in the early Link trainers, the forerunner of today’s flight simulator. When World War II came along, she had to choose either to join the WASP or to stay with United on the chance that she could be their first female pilot. United won the toss. After the airline moved their training to Denver, Doris Langher participated in the training of every pilot who flew for United. Her timing was wrong, though, and by the time her employer opened up the pilot ranks to women, Langher was too old to fly the line.

  She always kept her skills sharp in real airplanes, not just the simulators, and became type-rated in the exciting new Lear jet. When riding along in the back end while another pilot received dual instruction in the Lear, something went terribly wrong, and Langher died in a Lear jet crash as a passenger.

  MILITARY

  Shortly after the airlines unlocked the cockpit doors to women, the United States military decided women could fly their airplanes, though actually, the buck stopped at Congress. Way back during World War II, more than three hundred fifty thousand women had joined the armed forces. Clerical fields were their first stop, but soon there were female truck drivers, airplane mechanics, parachute riggers, and lab technicians. Although not allowed in combat, women were, in reality, in every theater of the war and were shot at, wounded, killed, and taken prisoner. At war’s end, Congress passed the Women’s Armed Services Integration Act, restricting the number of women to 2 percent of the total force and their rank to colonel. One colonel per service.

  The 2 percent ceiling and grade limitations were finally lifted in 1967. Colonel Jeanne Holm was selected as the first air force female general officer in 1971, and five years later, the service academies began admitting women. In the eighties, women flew “noncombat” in KC-10s, KC-135s, and F-111s in Granada, Libya, and Panama, and finally, Congress saw fit to repeal the combat exclusion law for women in 1991. During Operation Desert Storm, women served in tanker, transport, and medical evacuation aircraft.

  Naval aviator Lieutenant Kara Hultgreen had her eye on space. She thought the best path to her goal would be through naval aviation, specifically as a test pilot. The daughter of parents who encouraged their daughters to take on any career they chose, Hultgreen wrote her mother, “Mom, thanks for telling me I could do anything.” She liked to quip, “Someone forgot to tell me when I was young that being born a girl was a birth defect.”

  Another (male) member of her squadron described Hultgreen: “She had that aggressive attitude towards success that it takes to be a good fighter pilot. But I don’t think people should keep referring to her or any other woman as a ‘female pilot.’ Kara was a good pilot, and a good person that happened to be a woman, not the other way around.”

  On October 25, 1994, Hultgreen was approaching the U.S.S. Abraham Lincoln in her F-14 at 145 knots preparing to “trap” (catch the wire on landing)—what Hultgreen called the “sport of kings.” Witnesses saw a puff of smoke from the engine, and as the jet lost altitude, collision with the ship appeared inevitable and the crew scrambled for safety. She turned away from the ship as her back seater ejected safely. Seconds later, as the airplane rolled, Hultgreen punched out also, but too late, and she went straight into the water. She was the first female fighter pilot to perish while in the service of her country.

  Witnesses aboard the carrier considered Kara Hultgreen a hero. “Who knows how many lives she saved? As far as I’m concerned, she sacrificed herself to save the ship,” said flight director Brian Kipp. Airman Stephen Snow, an aircraft handler on the flight deck, echoed those sentiments. “I saw the back seater eject just as the jet rolled away from the ship. The pilot was ejected into the water, head-first. But she saved a lot of people first. A ramp-crash could have started one helluva fire. Who knows what could have happened? That lady had some guts.”

  Lieutenant Kara Hultgreen was buried with full military honors at Arlington National Cemetery.

  BUSINESS

  Women’s role in the business of aviation has grown. Evelyn “Pinky” Brier came home from flying in the WASP during the war, and she settled into the flying business with her husband Joe. They owned the private Tri-Cities Airport in San Bernardino, California. Pinky flew charter (which is like saying Mother Teresa was a nun), and Joe kept the airplanes under repair—a man with a magical ear for a sick engine. Pinky advertised that she would fly anywhere at any time, and she did. She knew every grain of sand between the Los Angeles basin and Las Vegas, often flying gamblers over, then sleeping in her airplane awaiting their readiness to return. If she slept in a real bed, Pinky’s home was in the back of the hangar.

  Pinky Brier was one of the few who flew an honest-to-goodness one thousand plus hours per year in her string of twenty-seven Bonanzas and one Twin Bonanza, retiring with over forty-five thousand logged pilot hours. How she also squeezed in teaching students is a mystery, but Pinky taught hundreds of safe pilots, having been issued the first U.S. flight instructor certificate by the CAA in 1938. Pinky and Joe Brier’s private airport contained a prominent sign showing an annual tax bill of $60,000 on the airport property. Their busy, grass-strip airport at the east end of the Los Angeles basin exemplified the heart and soul of aviation’s post-war development in the United States.

  One of the more colorful of the early women pilots was Edna Gardner Whyte, who learned to fly in 1926. Somehow, she missed being a charter Ninety-Nine, but she missed little else in aviation. Gardner Whyte taught thousands of people to fly, and her greatest pleasure was greeting airline pilots who came back to see their first instructor. She told the story of the student who said she had taught his instructor’s instructor and asked what relation that made them. Gardner Whyte told him he was her great-grand pilot.

  Her passion was always competition, and she had to add a room onto her house to hold her more than one hundred trophies. After passing her seventieth year, Gardner Whyte bought property between Dallas and Forth Worth, and buil
t Aero-Valley Airport. The airport was a resounding success, as it quickly filled with airplanes and hangars. She continued to teach until the end of her life. She loved aerobatics and always said that flying upside down kept the blood flowing to her brain and kept her young.

  At the other end of the country, in a different kind of flying and a different time, Ellen Paneok, of Eskimo heritage, flew charter flights out of Barrow, Alaska. She contended with engines so cold they didn’t want to run, even if they consented to start. She conducted her preflight of the airplane with an eye out for curious polar bears. Her reward was giving the gift of transportation to those old and ill, unable to travel the old, roadless way. Paneok described wavering northern lights that applauded her landings with “crackling curtains” in the far north country’s minus thirty-five degree temperatures. Ellen Paneok was a charter pilot, writer, and artist, and she passed away in 2008.

  Page Shamburger was another aviation writer, the author of seven aviation history books and fifteen hundred freelance articles. As a youngster flying her first airplane, a little Cessna 140, legendary aviation newspaperwoman Tony Page hired the aspiring aviator to land at every airport in the countryside and write about it. The little southern girl with her slow drawl and big grin soon got a helicopter rating, bought a Bonanza, rode with the Hurricane Hunters, rode in an F-1 Phantom Jet, and, whenever on the ground, the woman of the South rode to the foxes.

  Beryl Markham was horsewoman, pilot, adventurer, and a writer. Ernest Hemingway, who did not throw compliments around carelessly, said in a letter to a friend, “Did you read Beryl Markham’s book, West with the Night? I knew her fairly well in Africa and never would have suspected that she could and would put pen to paper except to write in her flyer’s log book. As it is, she has written so well, and marvelously well, that I was completely ashamed of myself as a writer. I felt that I was simply a carpenter with words, picking up whatever was furnished on the job and nailing them together and sometimes making an okay pigpen. But she can write rings around all of us who consider ourselves as writers. I wish you would get it and read it because it is really a bloody wonderful book.” The memoir was rediscovered in 1983 to worldwide literary acclaim, called by some “the most inspiring aviation literature ever written.”