Viewing page 7 of 71

This transcription has been completed. Contact us with corrections.

[[image]]

[Text below image] Daring Blanche Stuart Scott in 1910

The Lady Flew

By William Gottlieb

In 1910, when her girl friends were being sedately driven in buggies to decorous tea parties, teen-ager Blanche Stuart (Betty) Scott was hurtling past them on her motorcycle bound for her flying lesson.
In that era, even male pilots were few (the Wright Brothers had started it all less than seven years before) and their mortality rate depressingly high. But no danger discouraged the fair and daring young lady in the flying coffin. She flew perched in the "undertaker's chair" of a "Curtiss pusher," so called because the plane's propeller pushed from the rear.
The controls of her motorized boxed kite, which would have unnerved today's instrument- happy pilot, consisted simply of: 1) a stick topped by a vertical wheel for taking off and landing, 2) ailerons for banking, 3) a rudder for turning and 4) a throttle for engine speed. On her second day at the Hammondsport, L.I. airport, where Glenn Curtiss was instructing her, the 5-foot

continued