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High-flying women give lift to fledging age of aviation

Some pioneer hazardous, long-distance routes

In 1932, stunt pilot Bettie Lund watcher her husband and flying partner Freddie crash to his death. Barely over the initial shock, she took a telephone call from the manager of the Charlotte, N.C., airport, who told her about Freddie's contract to appear in an air show there. "I'll fly in his place," Bettie said.

     Thus began her solo career of aerobatics—barrel-rolls, show rolls and inverted flying—along with the air races she regularly entered. She told a reporter that she felt she was a "crusader to establish the safety of the air."

     Bettie Lund, air-racer Phoebe Omlie, trail-blazer Amelia Earhart, record-breaker Jacqueline Cochran and dozens of other remarkable women in the 1930s

By Joyce Dall'Acqua 

became the symbols of a new era in aviation. Their mission: Convince people that flying was a safe means of transportation and that women made good pilots.
 
     The high-powered, high-flying women of early aviation had a major selling job to do. To the public of post-World War I America, flying was for the "foolhardy," or for the very wealthy who could afford to buy airplanes in the days when it was a fashionable stunt to land at a garden party or a race course.

     "The female pilots of the 1930s had a humanizing influence on aviation," says Claudia M. Oakes, associate curator at the Smithsonian's National Air and Space Museum in Washington, D.C. Oakes is author of a new book, "United States Women in Aviation, 1930-1939," celebrating the careers of these pilots who made headlines in their day but are mostly forgotten now.

     "These women made flying seem less dangerous, more commonplace," Oakes explains. "People of the day started to think, "If a woman can fly, anyone can," and this helped the general aviation industry to grow."
     
     THE DECADE'S famous female pilots were not only concerned with safety and comfort. Blanche Noyes, Louise Thaden, Omlie, Cochran and many other competed against men in air races—and won. Laura Ingalls performed 714 barrel-rolls in a row on May 8, 1930, flipping the men's record of 417. Omlie and "Pancho" Barnes were noted movie stunt pilots of the '30s.

     The airplane made it possible for women to travel alone on unprecedented journeys. Earhart, history's best known female pilot, flew many "firsts"—the first woman to fly as a passenger across the Atlantic (1928), the first person to fly across the Atlantic twice (1932), the first to solo from Hawaii to the U.S. mainland (1935).

     Amy Johnson, Beryl Markham, Lady Mary Heath and others pioneered hazardous, long-distance air routes.

     Ruth Nichols set a nonstop distance record, from Oakland, Calif., to Louisville, Ky., in 1931, just a few months after injuring her back severely in an airplane crash. Nichols was the only woman simultaneously to hold the women's records for speed, distance and altitude in heavy landplanes. She was one of the first women to fly dirigibles, gliders, seaplanes, amphibians and four engine aircraft.

     Nichols knew that women's air races and distance flights attracted publicity. She wrote in a 1932 magazine

[[bottom margin]]South Bend Tribune, Sunday, March 30, 1986[[/margin]]


[[Image]]

FIRST WOMAN to break the sound barrier, in 1954, Jacqueline Cochran stands at Beechcraft Staggerwing with which she finished third in the 1937 transcontinental Bendix Trophy Race.

article, "News is a saleable asset and has a concrete value in dollars and cents," money that could help improve aircraft design and safety.

     FAY GILLIS WELLS, another well-known pilot of the 1930s, says of Nichols, "She just never gave up. She wanted to be the first women to fly across the Atlantic, but she crashed in Newfoundland and Amelia (Earhart) beat her to it."

[[Image]]

Amelia Earhart atop her Lockheed Electra in 1936 with some of her Purdue women aviation students.

     Wells, now in her 70s, had an unusual opportunity in 1930, when her father, a mining engineer, was transferred to the Soviet Union. After moving there, she worked as a journalist and continued to fly. In 1933, she became the first American woman to fly a Soviet-made airplane. 
     Wells was asked to accompany Wiley Post, the first

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