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AERIAL AGE WEEKLY, July 12, 1915 403 Dropping Three Thousand Feet by Parachute The Valuable Achievement of Miss Tiny Broadwick [[image]][[/image]] DIFFERENT traits or peculiarities are known to run in different or peculiar families. Even unto the third and fourth generations, it has been said. The paramount trait of the Broadwick family of Ocean Beach, is to defy death. That's why Tiny Broadwick, a slip of a girl of 19 summers, is today considered the most daring of female aeronauts the world has ever known. Her faather was ascensionist and parachute jumper before Tiny was born. His father was practising that same perilous occupation when Tiny's father was a very little boy. To Tiny Broadwick ballooning, aeroplaning and parachute jumping are very natural things to do. She is more at home 2,000 or 3,000 feet in the air than she is with both of her tiny feet planted on the ground. She is happier, there, too. Just the other day the bird-girl electrified army aviators at the North Island camp in San Diego by announcing that she was preparing to plunge from a military aeroplane while dashing through space at a speed of 75 miles an hour. They tried to talk Tiny out of it, but she laughed at their fears and said a little feat like that would be easy for most any member of the Broadwick family. Besides, she said, she was impelled by a desire to prove to Uncle Sam that an aerial life preserver invented by her father is a four-ply success. They told Tiny Broadwick finally to go right ahead--in the interests of science and her country. A conqueror of the air since a child of 6, and the survivor of more than 600 sensational leaps, in which she has never sustained anything worse than a few broken bones, little Tiny Broadwick said that she was ready for the newest sensation. Her life-saving device was carefully arranged and as Brig. Gen. George P. Scriven, chief of the aviation bureau [[image]][[/image]] of the U.S. army, looked wonderingly on, Tiny sailed skyward. With Gen. Scriven on the ground below, all equally excited, were a score of skilled army aviators, and a party of people from the Hotel de Coronado. When Tiny Broadwick started on her hazardous journey, she wore a natty walking suit. The life preserver, encased in canvas, hung like a knapsack over her shoulders. Oscar Brindley, Wright instructor here, was at the wheel. At a height of 1600 feet Brindley suddenly dropped 100 feet and then raced straight ahead the length of the field, to stand erect. She took one step forward to the edge of the framework. Then she dived, head downward, toward the earth. Would the parachute open? Two seconds told the story, but those two seconds seemed like hours to those below. And then of a sudden the parachute was ripped from her shoulder by a string attached to the fuselage of the aeroplane. It caught the air. It opened wide! Gracefully as a bird, the intrepid girl floated to the ground. A rabbit, which scampered from a sagebrush just as she struck the earth, frightened her for the moment and caused her to lose her balance. She quickly regained her composure, however, and laughed merrily over the incident. "It was much easier than leaping from a balloon," laughed Tiny, crawling from her parachute. "There was not so much of a strain when the parachute opened because I was dashing sideways as well as downward. "You're a plucky girl," said the brigadier general. "That's what they say," said Tiny. "But I don't call it pluck. i call it joy. There's no real fun except far up in the air." Gen. Scriven shook his head. He said he didn't know. But he added that he hoped it would continue to be all joy and no sorrow for little Tiny Broadwick in the dangerous occupation that she loves so well. [[image]][[/image]]
