Before Amelia (44 page)

In 1934 she worked with Paul Garber repairing what was left of the original
Vin Fiz,
the aeroplane Cal Rodgers used to fly across the country. How much of the machine was authentic is debatable. Alys thought two or three parts at most, but the
Vin Fiz
name on the rudder fin looked like what she had seen years before at Pasadena.

In 1938 she received a happy remembrance from Canada—the Philatelists of Vancouver sent her an air–mail cachet commemorating the twenty–fifth anniversary of the first flight made in Canada by a woman. She was thrilled and touched. Writing to her neighbors to the north, she said: “During the 25 years that have slipped away I have never lost my interest in aviation. Although WINGS have given me everything—and have taken from me—everything but my own life, my love for them has never diminished and now my one thought—one prayer—is that WINGS may be used NOT for destruction, but for making more friendly and understanding relations between the nations of the earth.” She had warm greetings for the pioneer fliers everywhere: “There is between us a bond incomparable; for every barnstorming flight was made with the thought and hope of making at least ONE person AIRMINDED ... and we did succeed.”

Alys was sixty–one when the United States went to war again in 1941. She had reached an age when most women begin to think of slowing down. Not Alys! For two years she battled to go to work doing what she did best, building or repairing aeroplanes, refusing to accept the fact she was considered too old. Finally, TWA hired her to work in the Inter–Continental Division, Hangar No. 2, at Washington National Airport. Alys was jubilant. “It isn't how many years one has lived, but how one has lived those years” that mattered. Alys worked ten hours a day, eight on Sunday, and proved she could do “a better job than the men.”

Her job called for doing a little bit of everything and, as she wrote to a friend, “the nice part is that no one has to tell me how to do it.” She read blueprints, made parts from prints, riveted and welded to repair or create new parts; the work was hard and constant, and she loved it. She was especially pleased to show her superiors that age “isn't always the bugaboo it is supposed to be.” She marveled at the engineering designs for the machines she worked on, was delighted to have lived to see the amazing progress in aviation. Regretfully, war had brought it about. She was confident, however. “We shall win—but at what a price.”

When the war ended, Alys put away her toolbox. “Moms,” as she was known during her days at National Airport, held one dream for most of her life: to earn money to buy an aeroplane, for “that's the only sensible way to travel.” At her home in Washington, she sewed, sold cosmetics and jewelry, gave massages, did whatever might earn money. In spite of her optimism, something always kept her from her dream, though heaven knows it wasn't for trying.

Alys McKey Bryant died on September 6, 1954, at seventy–four years of age. friends believed she was born with wings. She spent seventy-four years proving they were right.

Lily Irvine, British born, married the American James V. Martin in England in 1911 and left that country before earning her pilot's license. Both she and her husband trained at the Grahame–White School at Hendon, but it was in America that Lily made her mark as a flier and did her most important work.

James Martin, while a student at Harvard, had founded the Aeronautical Society there and promoted the first air meet at Boston in 1910. His meeting with Grahame–White at that meet led to his studying in England, where he met Lily. Born in Durban, South Africa, in 1891, Lily lived in Newcastle, South Africa, for most of her childhood before immigrating to Britain. As a young woman she horrified her mother by wandering about Hendon Aerodrome in grease–smeared overalls to learn aircraft construction.

A great–niece, Helen McCurdy, has written that Martin claimed for his wife, Lily, the honor of being “the first English–speaking woman to operate an Aeroplane—the first woman to fly in America.” Not quite accurate on either count since Blanche Stuart Scott and Bessica Raiche were both flying aeroplanes in America in 1910, and Hilda Hewlett was certainly operating an aeroplane at Brooklands, England, in 1911. However, it made good copy.

Following their marriage in 1912, the couple came to the United States.
Flight
reported that Lily made a fine flight over London before leaving to catch a westbound boat. Back home in America, James Martin made exhibition flights to raise money for a planned transatlantic flight, the grand ambition of many aviators. Lily appeared with him regularly and flew exhibitions on her own after her initial debut in Boston.

The
Boston Post
was glowing about her performance: “Mrs. Martin Clinches Title to Queen of the Air.” The size of the Farman machine led the reporter to wonder if the slight woman could master “the monster” in the air. She could and she did, sailing through space with “the grace of a bird.” The
Post
reported that word of her flight quickly spread outside the field, and hundreds of eager spectators hurried to the field.

Her career launched, Lily appeared around the country for the next several years. She and James traveled to Alaska, where they flew at 10:30 at night in broad daylight, the first aeroplane exhibition ever in Fairbanks. The money earned by such appearances helped Martin build aeroplanes that excelled because of their speed and stability. Lily piloted Martin aeroplanes for several years.

On one such flight at Cleveland in 1914, she flew seventy–four miles in sixty minutes. The crowds gathered on Euclid Beach cheered lustily as the hydro–aeroplane launched from Cedar Point came into view. Lily circled near the excited thousands on the beach at two hundred feet, to give them a close–up view, before landing offshore, exactly between the two white flags that marked the site. Flying four miles more than the prescribed seventy–mile course because of the wind, she had cut ten minutes off the record made by Glenn Curtiss in 1910. Speaking afterward, Lily said, with “a little more favorable wind, I believe I could have made the trip in fifty minutes or less.”

In 1914, husband and wife were working with the Aeromarine Plane and Motor Company in Avondale, New Jersey. Martin designed and built hydro–aeroplanes, and Lily piloted them. When the couple's first child was born, she gave up flying altogether. Despite the lack of a pilot's license and the creditability it bestows, Lily proved herself a capable flier.

IN 2002 IT IS IMPOSSIBLE to imagine the excitement, the wonder viewers felt in the early years of the twentieth century on seeing an aeroplane skimming through the sky. It was miraculous. And the people who drove those magical machines were of heroic nature—hardly mortal. They were all men in the beginning, which was the proper state of affairs, so most men believed.

The pioneer women aviators, a gutsy group, were never large in number, but their presence was an affirmation of women's determination to overcome the prevailing mentality, which still appears at times: Women don't do that. These women did it, frequently much better than their male peers, for the sheer fun of it.

A casual viewing of Walter Jerven's film
Himmelstürmer,
an archival work of early film from various countries, shows how completely aviation was a man's world. Women were enthusiastic spectators, but they are nonexistent in the film except for brief glimpses of Raymonde de Laroche and Melli Beese.

Henry Woodhouse, an early authority on aviation, writing in
Flying
in June 1913, explained the difficulties faced by the woman who wanted to make a living flying. Foremost was the need to maintain the fragile machine that carried her aloft. “She is the slave of her big, expensive, frail aeroplane,” he wrote. Keeping it tuned, a full-time occupation, required a good mechanic and often an assistant, unless the pilot had mechanical training. Her life depended on their skill and diligence, not always a comfortable situation.

Then there was the expense. Moving from place to place was costly and cumbersome, as there was no special facility to handle aeroplane transport in 1913. Woodhouse wrote that women seldom commanded fees equal to those paid to men, and event organizers were notorious for holding fliers to the terms of a contract regardless of weather or other circumstances. A sudden summer tempest could cost the flier her fee, leaving her to pay for transportation out of pocket. Furthermore, fearing the possibility of accidents, many organizers refused to hire women fliers even though the fatality rate among men at meets was predictably higher than the two female fatalities (Harriet Quimby and Julia Clark).

Flying was “a psychological process,” according to Woodhouse, dependent on a feeling of confidence. When pilots knowingly went up in machines that had a faulty motor or were otherwise unsafe, they were risking their well-being. Knowing a machine's faults caused mental strain that could be dangerous, leading to panic and a fall. It was far better, Woodhouse thought, for a flier to be oblivious of a machine's limitations, hardly a safe situation, which surely contributed to the accident rate in early aviation.

Woodhouse's article failed to acknowledge the competency displayed by early women aviators, most of whom flew assuredly in their fragile machines, knowing they were as airworthy as possible. They were experienced enough to know from a motor's sound when something was wrong and take immediate action. In an emergency, these female aviators proved they had the quickness of mind to survive, thanks to courage and skill.

“If she has the means and flies for sport” was the best of all worlds for women pilots, noted Woodhouse, who probably thought deep down that women didn't belong in the rough and dangerous life of exhibition flying, the only way open to women who wanted to earn a living in aviation. It would take two wars before attitudes toward women flying began to change, and then only because of necessity.

The press in the early years gave considerable prominence to women fliers, particularly in America, where so much of aviation was more entertainment than science. The first appearance of a woman in an aeroplane was news, especially her costume. As women performed more spectacularly, the press reported in depth. Ruth Law's and Katherine Stinson's distance flights and aerial acrobatics had good coverage. In Europe, women shared news space with men equally, but their fewer numbers and venues for exhibition meant fewer articles about women. The French journals were the exception; the interest there centered on costume and attitudes. The major aviation journals in England and America were evenhanded in writing about women fliers; they appeared on covers, and their activities were reported along with those of the men.

It is surprising, therefore, to read fact books for early aviation that have no mention of women in the early years. Did their authors not know, or did women fail to meet certain standards? It's as if women pilots in America began with Amelia Earhart, the one woman mentioned in most sources. The last thirty-some years have seen a change, however. A casual reading of standard aviation surveys will find the names of Harriet Quimby, Katherine Stinson, and Ruth Law, a definite improvement. Elsewhere, there has been a similar change in writing about aviation history, spurred, perhaps, by women doing the writing. French and German writers have discovered some of the fascinating women who flew before World War I and rescued them from oblivion.

In the years between the wars, women flew across continents and oceans, set records, and raced in women's events, but the prevailing attitude about women in the growing commercial-aviation industry had changed little from that of the World War I military. Helen Richey, hired over eight male competitors to fly for Central Airlines in 1934, quit ten months later when a Department of Commerce ruling barred her from flying in bad weather. At the same time, the pilot's union refused her application for membership.

Helen taught students to fly for the air force in World War II, then flew in England with ATA (Air Transport Auxiliary) and in the United States with the WASPs (Women's Airforce Service Pilots). In spite of this record, she found doors closed in commercial aviation when the war ended. Despondent, she committed suicide in 1947.

Today the scene is more promising for women wishing to make a career in aviation. At least four universities around the country offer fouryear programs that train women and men for careers in this field. Nora Sullivan, a recent student at Purdue University, said that in her class of sixty-five to seventy students, ten were women. The program is tough—training hours have increased dramatically from the three or four hours of the early years—but at the end of two years and sixty-some hours of flight time, students generally earn a private pilot's license. At the completion of the four years, with simulator experience on various types of aircraft, the graduates earn an air-transport license, which often means immediate employment on commercial airlines. A woman as first officer or captain on a transatlantic flight is no longer unusual—a recent flight had all women in the cockpit.

Federal Aviation Administration statistics show that women who fly commercially represent almost 5 percent of licensed pilots, earning comparable pay with men in particular positions, and their numbers in other aviation positions are slowly rising. Women work in airline transport, as mechanics, repair people, air-traffic controllers, ground instructors, flight engineers, and flight instructors, thanks to federal laws that have opened doors for women in aviation. Reluctantly the military services have taken women into their ranks, but the numbers are small compared with civilian aviation. At NASA (the National Aeronautics and Space Administration) women number 33 percent of total employees, almost 18 percent of the scientists and engineers, and 23 percent of the astronauts, according to statistics for the year 2000. Estimates for the next five to ten years call for fifteen thousand pilots to replace those retiring from the cockpit; women who are trained will share that opportunity. The adventuresome women who climbed into the rickety bamboo-and-wire contraptions of yesterday would not be surprised. They might wonder: Why did it take so long?