by Carol Baxter
When she looked back to see where the other planes were, she realised that she had headed towards the pylon for the ten-mile laps, rather than the five-mile laps. She had just lost time on the critical first leg.
By the time she was back on track, Amelia had caught up with her and was jockeying for position. The rules said that Amelia must keep at least 150 feet to the right and at least fifty feet above and mustn’t attempt to pass between Chubbie and the pylon. Chubbie kept glancing around, checking Amelia’s whereabouts as she came into the turn, worried that she might be caught in the deadly turbulence of her friend’s plane.
The first turn was a critical learning experience. ‘Turns win the race’ was the advice from the experts. She tried not to bank for the turn too soon because she risked crashing into the pylon. Banking too late was almost inevitable because of her inexperience, which shot her too far beyond the pylon and wasted precious time.
Along the straight towards the second pylon. She tried not to take the second turn too sharply, because she would lose too much speed. And she tried not to take it too widely because any extra distance wasted time in this time-elapsed race. All the while she had to keep an eye on the nearby planes as they jostled for the best turning position, and for the slipstream of those who had already sped around the pylon.
Another straight stretch; another turn. While she and the other inexperienced pilots headed horizontally around the pylons, the more experienced Lady Heath climbed in the straight stretches and then dived towards the pylons. The English aviator reached her lowest altitude when she was halfway around the pylon, with her plane nearly vertical and a wingtip almost skimming the ground; then she would climb again for the second half of the turn. This meant that Chubbie also had to look out for planes that might be above her and beginning to dive for the turn.
It was clear from the start that Phoebe was racing around the circuit at an astonishing pace. And Lady Heath, with her outstanding piloting skills, was definitely in the money for one of the other prizes.
More straight stretches. More turns. Every so often Chubbie would spot the grandstand—a kaleidoscope of colours—then it would be gone. One moment she was counting the laps. The next she had lost track of the number. She decided to do one more lap for good measure . . . and another. When she saw officials trying to flag her down, she realised she must have completed the course. She would later discover that she’d flown fourteen laps instead of the required ten. She would also learn that the seasoned campaigners attached pieces of tape to their instrument panel, one for each required lap, and peeled them off as they went past the checkpoint.
Phoebe was clearly the winner. The timekeepers reported that she had sped around the course at an extraordinary 112.4 miles per hour. The crowd was cheering her when the judges announced she had been disqualified for cutting a corner when she rounded the second pylon. And Amelia was also disqualified for fouling Chubbie on the fourth lap, much to Chubbie’s distress because of their friendship.
Chubbie’s look of astonishment at having come second at 98.7 miles per hour—a faster speed than both Lady Mary and Amelia—turned into a delighted smile when she was called to take Phoebe’s place on the podium. The punters were equally astonished. Most had been backing Phoebe, Lady Mary or Amelia. Chubbie had won what the press regarded as the most colourful event of the day along with a prize of $500 and a huge trophy. As the first race of its kind ever held for women, pictures of the trophy and her glowing face were published in many of the world’s newspapers.
Phoebe protested her disqualification, saying that she had re-circled the missed pylon. Chubbie supported her claim, despite the impact this would have on her own prize and winnings. Mary Heath did so as well. The race committee reversed the disqualification; however, instead of sliding Chubbie back to second place, it allowed the two pilots to tie for first place position and allocated Phoebe $500 as well.
After the Cleveland races, Chubbie returned the Fleet to its owners. Ultimately, it passed into the hands of Frank Goldsborough, the son of the late Brice Goldsborough who had died in an attempted Atlantic crossing in 1927. In May 1930, Frank used Chubbie’s plane to set junior transcontinental flight records. Two months later, he crashed the plane and died from his injuries. It was his twentieth birthday.
Chapter Twenty-Four
She had done it. Her derby success—in particular, her pylon race win—had proved to the aviation world that she was among the elite of the elite. She had finally shed the ‘Melbourne housewife’ persona, not only from the world’s perspective but, as importantly, from her own.
Consolidated Aircraft’s managers were so pleased that they gave her a handsome bonus. And other manufacturers came knocking.
Fairchild Airplane Manufacturing Company approached her about taking part in the National Air Tour for the Edsel B. Ford Reliability Trophy—or the Ford Reliability Tour, as it was commonly known. Ford was president of his father’s Ford Motor Company, which manufactured aircraft as well as automobiles. The tour’s aim was to promote the aviation industry and display the speed and reliability of the planes entered in the tour. An invitation to participate was an honour indeed.
Two other female pilots would join the aerial cavalcade, derbyist Mary Haizlip and barnstormer Frances Harrell, who would later die in a pylon-race crash. As the first extensive aerial competition to pit men and women against each other, it had piqued the media’s attention and Fairchild was going to make the most of it.
When Chubbie, with her down-to-earth Australian pragmatism, saw the pretentious flying attire they wanted her to wear, she couldn’t help being amused. White kid jodhpurs—how was she going to keep them clean? White silk shirt and black tie. White V-neck jumper with a black line as a trim. White kid Norfolk jacket lined with lamb’s wool. White helmet and black boots. She would look like a little white pixie.
Fairchild didn’t stop there. Her plane—an open-cockpit Kreider-Reisner biplane—was also all-white with a black trim. She was to be accompanied by two other white Fairchild planes, one piloted by a male derby first-prize winner.
The White Fleet, as it was soon called, flew from Buffalo to Detroit in an arrow-shaped formation with Chubbie in the lead, as if she were the Queen of Sheba and the other planes were filled with her minions. The formation brought a smile of satisfaction to her face and that of every other female aviator who had suffered disparagement from the world’s men.
Among the twenty-nine registered tour planes was a Great Lakes trainer Bill was piloting. Not only did the tour pit men against women, it pitted teacher against student. Many a man’s sense of self-worth would struggle to cope with the prospect of being beaten by a student, let alone a female student, let alone an illicit lover. But Bill was different. He was proud of her achievements. He was determined to do everything possible to assist her escalating career and had become her unofficial manager.
On 5 October 1929, the thirty-two-city tour began. The tour planes, along with another dozen aircraft carrying officials and journalists, crossed the border to Windsor, Ontario, to begin their seventeen-day trip. It would take them to Montreal, then down the Atlantic seaboard states to Florida, from whence they would dog-leg through the Midwest and return to the Ford airfield on 21 October.
The flying was hard: 5100 miles in seventeen days with two flights per day and a formal dinner every evening. Chubbie soon learnt what some of the men thought of the women’s involvement. She had never previously flown the route so she was grateful when a male pilot offered to lead the way. It wasn’t long before she realised he was leading her astray. She broke off and returned to navigating for herself, accepting it as one of life’s useful lessons. It probably wasn’t personal, just further evidence of many men’s unwillingness to welcome female aviators into their industry.
Onwards flew the cavalcade of planes. As they roared over towns and cities like an aerial motorcade, eyes lifted to watch them. At each stopping place, the town’s citizens couldn’t help gazing for a moment long
er at the tiny virginal-looking female pilot. Extraordinarily, by the end of the second day, she was coming eighth in the competition, beating all but seven of the male pilots. Many of the beaten men were celebrities in the industry like humourist Will Rogers’ personal pilot, Wiley Post, with his rakish eye-patch.
The tour wasn’t an air race as such, although points were awarded for speed. Points were also awarded for other flying skills, including stick-ability: the pilots had to take off with a full load in as short a distance as possible (‘unstick’) and land in the shortest distance possible (‘stick’) in their brakeless machines. The race authorities had a formula for calculating each of the variables and moved the pilots up and down the tour ladder based on the points gained or lost. Chubbie’s success in this test had helped move her up a few places.
She could have been out of the tour on day five. ‘Woman saves boy’s life’ was the headline in some of the country’s newspapers. It wasn’t quite true. When she landed at Richmond, Virginia, on 9 October, she was horrified to realise that her still speeding plane was about to collide with a boy who had foolishly dashed onto the landing strip. She threw her plane into a ground-loop. In doing so, she risked a rollover, a particularly dangerous mishap in an open-cockpit aircraft, which lacked overhead protection. Her wheel caved under the strain of the sudden turn, but the damage proved to be only minor and she was able to continue with the tour, albeit with a drop in placing.
She was back in eighth place by the end of the tour, much to her own and Fairchild’s satisfaction. Whipping the majority of the male pilots proved as pleasing as being handed a purse containing $500.
She had not only outshone most of the other male pilots, she had outshone her own lover.
On 3 September 1929, the day after the Cleveland races ended, frenzied buying had seen the Dow Jones Industrial Average peak. By the time the Ford Reliability Tour finished on 21 October, the stock market had dropped sixteen per cent from its high. Few were worried, though. The market was still considered ‘fundamentally sound’.
Then on 24 October 1929, the Wall Street Crash began. When the market later rallied, the seers thought the correction was over, unaware that the raging bull had turned into a hibernating bear. A world that had only recently survived the Great War and the Spanish Flu epidemic was about to face another hardship of devastating proportions.
Chapter Twenty-Five
Chubbie didn’t hesitate when she was offered one of the most dangerous jobs in the world. New Jersey’s recently established Victor Aircraft Company was building a new plane and wanted her to become its chief test pilot at an income of nearly $4000 per year. It was one for the record books. When she accepted, she became the first female test pilot in the history of international aviation.
The role of a test pilot wasn’t simply to climb into the cockpit of a newly built plane, speed down the runway and see if it would fly. That was part of the job, naturally, and had been since planes had first taken to the sky—and fallen out of it.
The first deadly test flight of a heavier-than-air plane had killed Frenchman Eugène Lefebvre in 1909. Thereafter, aircraft on test flights had regularly crashed. Wings fell off. Engines fell out of their mounts. At least parachutes had improved a test pilot’s survival odds, although early versions had alarmingly high failure rates.
Like all aviators, Chubbie knew the risks. Indeed, what pilot hadn’t heard the stories about the Alexander Aircraft Company’s problems with its revolutionary Eaglerock Bullet, the model Edith Foltz had flown in the derby on an ‘experimental’ licence. For commercial sales, the plane needed to pass stringent government accreditation tests, including those that changed its centre of gravity by moving crates of sand that had been loaded on board. The Bullet’s first accreditation test pilot—who flew the plane a few weeks after the derby—successfully parachuted out when he encountered a deadly problem and was paid $100 for his endeavours. A week later, the widow of the second was paid $250. The third demanded $500 to put the plane through the rigorous certification process. He too had a successful bail out. The fourth demanded $1000 in advance before he flew the plane, and the money passed to his estate.
Part of the problem was that test pilots couldn’t bail out the instant a plane encountered difficulties. In fact, they had to deliberately generate problem situations in order to truly test the aircraft.
Of course, only a small amount of a chief test pilot’s time was actually spent in the air. More time was devoted to the planning and analysis stages. First, Chubbie and the designers had to prepare a flight plan so she would know what they wanted her to assess. When she took to the air, she had to stick as rigidly as possible to this flight plan. Afterwards, she had to communicate her observations to the ground teams so they could implement any necessary changes.
Not any pilot could be a test pilot. What the Victor Aircraft Company saw in Chubbie was, firstly, the life-saving asset required by all test pilots: quick reflexes. Almost as importantly, she had the intuitive feel for aircraft that allowed her to sense, both physically and mentally, when one was behaving oddly, and the mental calmness and clarity needed to cope with multiple problems at the same time. She also had the practical intelligence of an aviation mechanic and, to top it all off, she was a good communicator.
Chubbie told the press she was to test-fly a new type of plane—one that could take off in a hundred feet and land at about twenty miles an hour, one with a surprisingly thick wing and terrific lift. If all went well, the company planned to build her a racing version, which she would take on a demonstration tour through Florida and the west coast during the winter months.
When she took up Victor Aircraft’s first plane for its maiden flight early in December 1929, the press announced ‘First woman test pilot’. She told them that the experience was thrilling but not scary. She was too busy following her flight plan and assessing the results to have any time to be frightened.
Victor’s plane flew, but unfortunately the company didn’t. When the receivers turned up a short time later, she was out of a job.
Charles T. Stork saw a different side of Chubbie—her bright-eyed bubbliness—when he chatted to her and Bill at a cocktail party early in 1930. His company, the C.T. Stork Corporation, was looking for staff. Liking the looks and skills of the engaging pair, he organised to meet with them to discuss his proposal.
At his office, he explained that his company had recently obtained the metropolitan distribution rights for Cirrus engines, Irvin parachutes, Savoia-Marchetti amphibians, Stinson Juniors and Great Lakes trainers. He wondered if the role of demonstration pilot would appeal to them. When they said that it would, he offered each of them a retainer along with a large percentage of any sales they made.
Just as they were about to shake hands on the deal, he asked, ‘Have you both got commercial licences?’
With her usual frankness, Chubbie was about to blurt out that they only had private licences when Bill butted in. ‘Oh yes, yes, we have got those,’ he lied.
‘That’s alright then,’ said Stork, ‘because you must have a commercial licence to fly prospective customers to give them a demonstration.’ They agreed on a starting date the following week.
In the privacy of the building’s lift, Chubbie protested, ‘Bill, we don’t have commercial licences. What are we going to do?’
‘We’re going to get them,’ he reassured her. He too had been horrified at the thought of losing such an ideal job until he remembered that their friend J.R. Booth had a flying club in Ottawa, Canada, and had offered to help them if they ever needed anything. He told her he would telegraph Booth straight away and ask him to approach the Canadian Air Force about conducting the commercial licence tests. If they caught the overnight train, they would be in Ottawa by morning and could have the licences in their pockets by nightfall.
Chubbie had grown up in outback Australia, where the vibrant yellows and oranges and reds warned of its extreme heat. Canada, by contrast, was like a black-and-white photo, its
lack of colour attesting to a different extreme: an environment so wickedly cold that she found it difficult to breathe.
Booth was waiting for them at Ottawa when their train pulled in around 8.30 am. He handed fur coats to the shivering pair. As they snuggled into them, Chubbie wondered with horror what it would be like high in the freezing sky in an open cockpit.
Booth told them he had arranged everything, including accommodation, and that they were booked in for their medical tests that afternoon. When they explained that they hadn’t time to stay overnight, he took them out to lunch and plied them with warm food and alcohol—legally purchased alcohol. It helped them to thaw out. It also created a new problem: when they left the restaurant, Chubbie was drunk.
Her medical test was first. The doctor began his examination by saying that he would check her eyesight. When he saw her eyes roll, he asked what was wrong. She admitted that she had just come from America and had over-indulged at the Silver Slipper. The sympathetic doctor said he would put off the eye tests until the end of his examination.
She passed both the medical and flight tests, as did Bill. Still dressed in the same clothes they had worn to their meeting with Stork—with the addition each of a new toothbrush—they headed back to New York carrying the precious commercial licences that would open the door to paid employment.
The huge Stork showroom was like a playground for the wealthy. Situated in ‘airplane row’ at 1782 Broadway, New York, it was decorated as a hangar, with a mock airport and seaplane base visible through the open hangar doors at the rear. Chubbie and Bill, penniless celebrities in their own right, would be hobnobbing daily with the rich and powerful.
Among the demonstration planes was a Stinson Junior, a high-wing, closed-cockpit monoplane built for private users. Eddie Stinson, the company owner, insisted that they travel to Detroit and learn everything about the plane before they attempted to sell it. He later sent Chubbie a letter saying that she flew as well as any man. She was thrilled to receive the letter—and to sell one of his planes to a Jewish importer. The commission was large and for a time they felt like they were living in clover. She thought she had also sold a Savoia-Marchetti amphibian to a young man driving a handsome Duesenberg automobile; however, she was never paid a commission, probably because she and Bill found themselves out of work a short time later.
