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Hard Luck! Gladys O'Donnell's Airplane Is Simply Too Fast
Woman Flyer, Who Protests Award of Cross-Country Derby Prize, Explains How Motor Was Tuned Down.

BY AGNES HOLMQUIST

Gladys O'Donnell, storm-center of the protest over the Santa Monica-Cleveland derby race, just had too fast an airplane it seems. 

"My ship has a top speed of 170 miles an hour, with the propeller turning 2,300 revolutions a minute," she explains. "but the derby requirements will only permit 1,540 revolutions. We tested our ships in California, and they told me I'd have to tune mine down. So I did, and the propeller was sealed on. That makes it impossible to change the speed of the propeller on the flight."

But at St. Louis, she was asked to take another test, and was disqualified. It was the same story- too fast a ship.

"But she's a marvelous navigator- the best of us all," Mrs. Blanche Wilcox Noyes, the Cleveland entrant in the women's derby, said generously. 

That flying ability netted her $8000 in last year's races at Chicago.

The belief is that she will win consistently in the week's contests still ahead.

Mrs. Noyes has a charm to take her through the week. She, with other flyers, received gifts of Indian jewelry at Roswell, N.M.

"This ring was wished on," she exclaimed, turning a small silver ring on her finger, "and it's a thunder bird, an Indian good luck symbol. I'm not going to take it off until the races are over."

She's not planning to enter any events until Friday. The cross-country derby rather took the starch out- as it did for many of the women flyers.

Harold Gatty and Wiley Post who hold the round-the-world record, handed her the biggest compliment she has ever had, she says.

"Just recently at Cincinnati they let me take them up for their autogiro ride," she said. "They were like two youngsters. I piled them out in the field, helpless with laughing. You know their ship is so fast is just slides into the field over a long course. But I put them almost straight down from 1,000 feet up.

"Wiley told me he had wanted to fly with me ever since 1929, during the women's derby, when I had a broken landing gear, and landed safely despite it."

One woman flyer is just a modern hitch-hiker. Novetah Holmes, of Bridgeport, Conn., couldn't get a plane to bring to the races so she telephoned long distance to Major E. E. Aldrin of New York.

"Do you have any extra room in your plane - yes - no?" And the major, "Yes'd." So she's here just to watch, since her horizon holds no planes as yet.

She's doing her watching with a group that includes a woman flyer with an unusual job- Miss Lauretta Schimmoler, who directs the airport at Bucyrus, O. She was running a chicken farm when she decided that her city must have a port. She got rid of the farm, started out for money, and just recently had an airport opening that was a well-attended air-circus.