The Fabulous Flying Mrs Miller

by Carol Baxter

  It was a bad time to be attempting to sell luxury items. In the deteriorating economic climate, the market for private planes had collapsed. Aviation companies were jettisoning staff to stay afloat, and Chubbie and Bill were among those sacrificed.

  In the nine months since the Powder Puff Derby, the press had taken an increasing interest in Chubbie’s extracurricular activities. No longer were the newspapers reporting only her flight plans and race wins. She had inched her way up, flight by exhausting flight, until she was seated on the nation’s aviation pedestal.

  Or perhaps ‘teetering’ was a better word. The press could fawn one moment and lash the next. She hadn’t yet experienced its fury, but it would come, she knew, if the secret of her relationship with Bill was exposed. The press generally referred to him as her manager or associate. While some might suspect the truth, none had alluded to it—mercifully. She didn’t have the luxury of Pancho Barnes’ money, which allowed the shameless aviator to say, ‘To hell with everyone! I’ll do what I want!’ No aviation company would sponsor a ‘wanton woman’ to market its product. No lecture organiser would employ an ‘adulteress’ to inspire its audience. She had to maintain a constant vigilance about what she said and did, all the while hoping that nothing untoward would happen that might unwittingly bring their relationship to the public’s attention.

  Speaking engagements were regularly added to her calendar, and she was one of the celebrities invited to participate in ‘America’s first radio television theatre’ in Jersey City on 3 April 1930. It seemed appropriate that a pilot should be on the stage for this inaugural broadcast, a portrayal of both the visible and the invisible speeding through the ether. The production didn’t quite proceed according to plan. The broadcast ended up as ghostly flickering images combined with gurgling noises. Nonetheless, the proud Jersey City mayor announced this first to be a complete success.

  The theme of most of Chubbie’s talks was women’s advancement, both generally and in the aviation industry. Like Amelia, she used every opportunity to motivate women to strive for more than society wanted to allow them.

  Social constraints still bound most of the world’s women, both personally and professionally. There were only two careers in which women could evade or rise above these conventions: the Hollywood movie industry and the world of aviation. Movie stars still largely relied on their looks and feminine wiles to achieve career success so the industry itself was a long way from the forefront of feminism. Female aviators, however, were different. Their skills put them at the vanguard of feminism, whether they personally wanted to be there or not.

  Meanwhile, Harry Lyon still emitted the occasional rumble, telling a Lion’s Club meeting in April 1930 that his planned transatlantic flight would take place that summer with Bill and Chubbie as his pilots. It was news to Chubbie. They had pretty much given up on him and, instead, she had been making plans of her own.

  The Atlantic was still alluring. No woman had yet piloted a solo flight across it. Chubbie found a promoter who was willing to back her flight from Newfoundland to London. To minimise the risk, her equipment was to include an iron mike—a gyrocompass—similar to those used on ocean liners, which would help guide the plane over a planned course.

  Her promoter spent two-and-a-half months raising funds for the venture only to find that the plane couldn’t be equipped and tested in time for the most favourable weather window: 30 June to 15 July. A New York pressman calculated that if she had been successful, the financial reward would have been about $3 million.

  After abandoning her Atlantic flight plans, she was among the twenty-five female aviators who registered to fly in the lucrative 1930 Powder Puff Derby. However, on receiving the paperwork, they learnt that stringent restrictions had been imposed on the female pilots, among them that surgeons would follow them for the entire route.

  Chubbie was disgusted. ‘After being used to navigating a heavier plane,’ she told the press, ‘I object to flying a flivver plane, which the committee requires, and to being trailed by a plane carrying surgeons. These conditions do not apply to the men’s derby.’

  She, Amelia Earhart and many of the other well-known female aviators pulled out of the race. They knew that their decision would cost them financially at a time of increasing economic difficulty. Nonetheless, a critical principle was at stake. Every time they took to the air, they saw themselves as living proof that women could be men’s equals. Thus, the race committee’s rules were a slap in the face. They were determined to take a firm stand in the hope that their embargo would send a powerful feminist message and would force the race committee to rectify the situation the following year. Only six of the original twenty-five registrants ended up taking off from California to race to Chicago.

  With no other job prospects in the offing, Chubbie knew that she and Bill would soon be struggling for money. While the economic downturn made it hard for all pilots to obtain work, female pilots, by a strange twist, found it slightly easier because their scarcity made them a curiosity.

  It meant that the future for both of them rested largely on her shoulders. She would have to be the one to find a new source of income. She would have to undertake the task—life-threatening, perhaps—that earned the money. And she would have to accept that some of her hard-earned money would go to support Kiki and her children.

  She was beginning to resent it. All of it.

  Chapter Twenty-Six

  ‘Japan?’

  The incredulity in Guy Vaughan’s voice was almost embarrassing. Still, Chubbie wouldn’t let it deter her.

  Naturally she would have preferred the less dangerous option of finding paid employment. To get a job though, she needed to remind the aviation world that she existed. Since publicity and race winnings from the 1930 Powder Puff Derby were no longer within reach, her only solution was to set a new aviation record.

  No one had yet crossed the North Pacific.

  Some 5500 miles separated the American west coast from Japan. The Aleutian Islands lay between them, a potential refuelling site. If she succeeded in making such a flight, her name would be printed in the record books alongside Lindbergh and Kingsford Smith.

  She couldn’t afford to buy a plane, so she decided to try to loan one. First, though, she needed a good engine. The Red Rose flight had proved that a sound engine was critical, not only for success but for survival.

  When she approached Guy Vaughan, general manager of the Curtiss-Wright Corporation, and enquired about borrowing an engine, he asked what she wanted it for. He couldn’t conceal his disbelief when she told him.

  Vaughan was in fact horrified. Anyone who had read Kingsford Smith’s recently published tale of his transpacific flight would know that the man had only succeeded because of his piloting brilliance and the brute strength that enabled him to control the bucking plane through hours of wild storms. Yet here was this slip of a girl proposing a similar venture. He declared that she had no idea what was involved in such a flight and would drown herself. Under no condition would he lend her an engine for such a risky venture.

  She begged and begged.

  He eventually weakened, unable to resist the skilled aviator’s pretty face and pleading eyes. He agreed to lend her a Wright Whirlwind J-6-5 engine on one condition: that she promised to fly over land.

  Thinking quickly, Chubbie suggested a transcontinental flight. No woman had yet attempted to set a record for a flight from the east to west coast of America, or vice-versa. He gave his handshake of approval.

  Now all she needed was a plane.

  Someone mentioned the plane Errett Williams had flown in the 1929 National Air Races, the plane that had won him $15,000 in prize money in a three-month period. Reportedly, it was dumped in the Alexander Aircraft Company’s junkyard. It had developed a serious image problem.

  Like Edith Foltz, Williams had flown an Eaglerock Bullet under an experimental licence in the 1929 National Air Races. The Bullet was a revolutionary design, years ahead of its time. Until it
s advent, most aeronautical engineers had rationalised that the best way to increase a plane’s speed was to increase its engine’s power. The Bullet’s designer had recognised that horsepower could be used more effectively if the airframe was designed differently. Among a number of innovations, the Bullet’s landing gear retracted and tucked itself into the wing, significantly reducing drag.

  However, the Bullet’s problems arose when the company attempted to obtain the Air Commerce Bureau’s commercial accreditation. Under its testing regulations, the fully-laden four-seat plane had to be made to spin six times to the left and six times to the right and to recover from each set of spins in only one-and-a-half turns. To make a plane spin, the process is to pull back the throttle and hold the nose up. With the loss of airspeed comes a loss of lift (the aircraft stops flying) and then a stall followed by a spin. Alexander’s test pilots had tried to push the Bullet into a spin but it refused to oblige, merely falling away in a wide spiral with the pilot in complete control. Obviously, they needed a crack test pilot like Williams to make an annoyingly well-behaved plane behave badly.

  On 16 September 1929, Williams took a Bullet up to 7000 feet and put it through its paces, allowing it to slip into a nose-down spin. One rotation . . . two . . . three . . . five. All was looking good. Then its nose rose and its tail dropped and he realised that the Bullet was no longer recoverable. It had settled into a flat spin, a pilot’s nightmare because the nose couldn’t be pushed down far enough to pick up sufficient air speed to fly out of trouble. After twenty-six rotations, Williams gave up. His senses were swimming and he was barely conscious. Only his primeval survival instinct pushed him up through the escape hatch in the cockpit’s roof.

  After the Bullet killed two of the three accreditation test pilots who followed Williams, the company changed the design by extending the fuselage length and producing a slightly different wing shape. The new model ultimately received the necessary accreditation; but only because the Air Commerce Bureau at last recognised that it was an unspinnable aircraft, which made it a safe aircraft. None were ever sold. Once it had been dubbed the Killer Bullet, interest from prospective buyers evaporated.

  Chubbie used her aviation contacts to catch a lift to Colorado Springs. There she asked the Alexander Aircraft Company’s management about Williams’ racing plane. They said that it had never received the necessary certificate of accreditation, which she already knew. She told them about her transcontinental flight plans and assured them that she wouldn’t do anything that might trigger the spin problem. They agreed to give her the plane. They also reconditioned it, painting it fire-engine red with thin white outlines on the fuselage and windows.

  The dramas of her flight back to New York in the Bullet produced a story she would later call ‘my best joke on newspapermen’, a story she would regularly tell at speaking engagements. The joke happened at Kansas City.

  A number of pressmen were at the airport waiting for her to arrive from Wichita. They saw the Bullet swing over the field and land fast . . . without its landing gear down. It skidded along the soft cinder track for some distance then stopped with its nose poking into the ground.

  They raced towards the plane accompanied by aviators and ground staff, a doctor and an ambulance. When they saw her climb up through the escape hatch in the cockpit roof, they cried, ‘Are you hurt?’

  ‘No,’ she replied calmly. ‘The wheels wouldn’t come down and I had to land without them.’

  They were amazed at her composure. She seemed blissfully ignorant of the fact that a four-inch dip on either wing could have proved fatal.

  ‘The funny part of it,’ she later told her audiences, ‘was that everyone believed me.’ She paused for a moment, so she had the audience’s complete attention. Then she added, ‘If you go inside my plane now, you will see “WHEELS!” written in big letters on the instrument panel. What really happened that day was that I forgot to put down the landing gear.’

  Of course, the airport mechanics had ribbed her mercilessly after her botched landing. They were the ones who had made the ‘wheels’ sign. The problem was that she had momentarily forgotten that her plane had retractable landing gear. Moreover, she hadn’t received adequate landing-gear training in the first place, which wasn’t helped by the fact that the plane had no instruction sheet or warnings lights or alarm bells or a big lever with ‘Up’ and ‘Down’ symbols.

  Still, it was a good lesson. Better to have bungled an airport landing than an emergency landing in the wilderness. She made sure she knew exactly what she had to do before she set off again for New York to complete the preparations for her transcontinental flight.

  Two weeks later The New York Times announced, to her intense frustration, that Laura Ingalls was also planning a transcontinental flight—shades of the Red Rose flight all over again. Laura hadn’t flown in the 1929 Powder Puff Derby; however, she was an experienced pilot. She had recently beaten the world’s aviators, men as well as women, to set a new barrel-roll record.

  And Laura took to the air first. When she reached Los Angeles on 8 October in a flying time of thirty hours and thirty minutes, Chubbie decided that her only option was to beat it.

  For the previous few years, the fad had been for endurance flights, like the Red Rose’s. Now, flyers were shuttling across the country or dashing between towns in search of ever more obscure speed records. Not only did these flights grip the minds and stimulate the imaginations of the public at an increasingly difficult economic time, but the leading aircraft and engine manufacturers also took interest. These flights demonstrated the practical value of more streamlined planes with more powerful engines, not only for the promotional value that lay in air racing but for commercial aviation. As every businessman knew, faster usually meant cheaper, and cheaper meant more profits.

  Chubbie’s Bullet had a 120-horsepower engine, a cruising speed of 110 miles per hour, a top speed of 145 miles per hour and carried 100 gallons of fuel. She wasn’t planning to make a non-stop record attempt, which would have necessitated night-time flying and required blind-flying instruments she didn’t have. Morever, it was actually faster to make refuelling stops. The fuel quantities required for non-stop flights turned usually sprightly planes into lumbering elephants, as Kingsford Smith had learnt firsthand. The Southern Cross was so overladen with fuel when it left Suva, Fiji—it carried the equivalent weight of fifty-seven men—that after twenty minutes of flying it had climbed no higher than fifteen feet. Fortunately, the ocean swell wasn’t sixteen feet.

  Her own flight would also be more arduous than Laura’s, although the press made little mention of the fact. Laura had followed a pilot plane, which was responsible for navigation, so all she’d had to do was zoom along behind it. Chubbie had to do everything herself, a truly solo flight.

  Before she left New York, she took out her maps and drew her first day’s course. Then she jotted down the distances: 50 miles, 100 miles, 150 miles and so on. She calculated her compass courses and added those details to her maps. She would have to do the same each night of her flight. She knew that when she took to the air she couldn’t rely on someone else to lead her to safety. Her success depended on her own thorough preparations—and, of course, good luck.

  The pressmen noticed that Chubbie wasn’t decked out like a pilot when she headed across New York’s Curtiss Field airport on Monday, 13 October 1930. Instead, she was dressed demurely in a brown tweed skirt, a tan and red sweater, stockings, brown shoes and a cloche hat. She looked little different to the average woman walking along a New York street.

  She maintained the same demure image when she climbed onto a wing and posed for a picture while cleaning her windscreen. But she didn’t look quite so housewifely when she scrambled onto the top of her plane and slipped feet first into the cockpit, her only mode of entry and exit because of the extra fuel tanks sitting on the passenger seats.

  She shoved several cushions behind her to allow her to reach the rudder bar and controls. Then, with a cheery
wave, this twentieth-century woman gunned her plane’s engine and roared down the runway.

  ‘I’m so tired,’ she told the Indianapolis press, after flying for six hours and thirty-sixty minutes. ‘It’s the longest non-stop flight I’ve made alone.’ Then she begged for a cigarette.

  The press asked how her trip had been.

  ‘Filthy! You should have seen the Alleghenies. Fog, mist, rain. I discovered myself twenty miles off my course.’

  The Allegheny Mountains near the Atlantic seaboard created the most problems for pilots heading west from New York. The pre-flight weather forecasts had indicated that the conditions looked good all the way to Wichita, with a high ceiling and good visibility over the range. Instead, she encountered a low ceiling and poor visibility, causing her to fly off course, and delaying her journey by nearly an hour. After completing the mountain crossing, the fog and haze were so bad over Pennsylvania that she missed seeing the city of Pittsburgh altogether.

  The journalists asked her to smile for the cameras.

  ‘I’m too disappointed with the report of the weather conditions west of here to smile,’ she told them.

  The picture published the next day showed her clutching her hair with one hand and reading a sheet of paper held by the other, her face wearing a look of consternation bordering on horror.

  But she refused to be deterred by the news of rain at Wichita and a 400-foot cloud ceiling. After a refuelling break of only twenty-eight minutes, she was off again, planning to refuel at Wichita and stop at Albuquerque.