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American cross-country non-stop aviation record is held by a woman, Miss Ruth Bancroft Law, 29 years old, landed here from Chicago at 4:45 o'clock this afternoon in her Curtiss biplane, a little crestfallen because darkness had forced her to come down without completing the Chicago-New York flight she had planned. She will fly to New York tomorrow morning, landing at Governors Island about 8:30.

Miss Law hardly expected to make a non-stop flight to New York from Chicago-the gasolene tank in her little biplane would not carry enough fuel for that-but she did expect to dine to-night in Manhattan. As it was, when she came down this afternoon at Hornell, N.Y., for gasolene she was 668 miles from her starting point, which beat Victor Carlstrom's non-stop record by 216 miles.

Here is what Miss Law did:

                          Time  Miles
Left Chicago............ 8:26A.M.
Landed at Hornell,N.Y... 2:07P.M. 668
Left Hornell............ 3:13P.M.
Landed at Bingh'mton,N.Y.4:45P.M. 117
                                  --- 
Total distance covered........... 785                 
Total time in air, 7 hours 13 minutes
Average speed per hour, 108.6 miles.
*Eastern Time.

First Cross-country Flight.

Miss Law began to fly in 1912, and ahs always been known as an exhibition  flier. She has looped the loop and taken part in several aerodrome meets, but this is the first time she ever made any sort of a cross-country flight. Her longest previous flight was not more than twenty-five miles. 

The feature of Miss Law's achievement, aside from the fact that she is a young woman of slender build and not at all athletic, is that she came almost unheralded. She had an old aeroplane rebuilt by the Curtiss company a few days ago. Then she telegraphed the Aero Club of America that she would make a Chicago-New York flight in accordance with the club's rules, and asked that they send an observer to watch the start. She expected to start yesterday, but had motor trouble with the rebuilt machine, and had to wait over until this morning. She did not sit in Chicago day after day waiting for fair weather, as Carlstrom did, and her achievement is the more remarkable on that account. 

She steered by compass most of the way, flying at an altitude of 6,000 feet with a stiff breeze at her back. But when she was 300 miles from Hornell Miss Law had to slightly change her course, so that the wind blew across the machine. Then the engine began to take more gas, until her fifty-three gallons were exhausted when she was still two miles from Hornell, where she had arranged to stop. She was forced to volplane, without power, to the Hornell fair grounds, where experts from the Curtiss factory were waiting to fill up the tank.

In spite of her heavy clothing she was numb and stiff with the cold when she arrived at Hornell, but could hardly wait for the mechanics to inspect the machine, so anxious was Miss Law to get away again when she learned that she had bettered Carlstrom's record. 

Glad Handers Turn Out.

Binghamton's Chamber of Commerce has a glad hand committee, which got the job immediately when Miss Law was seen to land on the Willis Sharpe Kilmer stock farm. Samuel H. Dalley, the chairman of the committee, who was automobiling near the landing place, was the first to greet her. 

Miss Law's first words were, "I'm going to do it next time." She said that her failure was due to a delay of an hour and a half this morning in starting from Chicago, due again to motor trouble. She planned to start at 7 o'clock Eastern time. If she had had that much time before darkness, she said, she would have been able to complete the journey. 

At 2:30 o'clock this morning Miss Law arose from her night's sleep at the Morrison Hotel in Chicago. She put on first a suit of silk then a suit of chamois, two suits of woolen underwear, a suit of soft leather to keep the wind from her body and over all a heavy, fur lined overcoat. She wore on her head a woolen cap, covered with a woolen aviator's helmet and then a leather helmet. Two pars of wool stockings, heavy shoes, puttees, gloves and goggles completed her outfit.

Maps Sewed to Her Lap. 

Miss Law got to the hangar at 4:30 A.M., where maps of her route were sewed to her lap and right glove, and then she went up for a trial flight. She circled Grand Park twice and descended within five minutes. It was still dark, but lights on the field guided her. 

There was a sixty mile gale and her mechanics pleaded with her to wait for more favorable weather conditions. But Miss Law said the gale would help her and refused flatly, demanding that they start her engine. Soon she disappeared in the hazy mist and an hour and a half later was reported as passing over Kendallville, Ind., 143 miles away. Reports from different towns and cities along the route indicated that the wind at her back was helping out her motor and that at times she attained a speed as much as three miles a minute.  

Miss Law is a sister of Rodman Law, parachute jumper. She was born at Lynn, Mass., on March 21, 1887, and holds license No. 188 of the Aero Club of America, which she took on November 20, 1912, in a Wright biplane. She was flying even before she took her pilot's license, making her headquarters on Staten Island. In those days, when there was no aviation industry in this country and when aviators were few, those connected with aeronautics did not think much of Miss Law's flying. They told her she would never succeed. But she kept on trying and came out of fall after fall with little more than a few scratches. 

Her First Real Machine.

Miss Law brought her little exhibition machine, one of those like Beachey flew, where the aviator sits strapped out in front, with nothing under him but the ground, to New York to the Sheepshead Bay aviation meet last May and took a few prizes there. She came in third in a twenty mile race around the track. Since then she has been looping through the South and West. The reason she never

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