Walking on Air (16 page)

Like all pilots of the era, Phoebe was intimately familiar with the problem of ground-looping. During her first competitive race in 1928, her plane ground-looped during a crosswind landing at Marfa, Texas. Her own research into the problem involved a toy model of her Monocoupe. She found that when she pushed it forward across a table the model ground-looped; when she pushed it backward, it did not. In other words, because of the location of the plane's center of gravity relative to its wheels, during forward motion the plane's tail, not its nose, tended to lead the way down the runway. At the lab, she worked with Weick in developing the performance and safety specifications for Vidal's competition, and constructed a
scale model of the W-1 for testing and demonstration purposes. Working with the model, she became even more convinced that tricycle gear was the most stable, with the added benefit of vastly improving visibility on the ground.
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Since Vidal's goal was to make flying as easy and safe as driving the family automobile, Phoebe and the engineers looked for ways to simplify the traditional control system, which used three components: the elevator (control surfaces on the horizontal tail that control nose up or nose down), ailerons (control surfaces attached to the trailing edge of the wings, the movement of which causes the plane to bank in one direction or the other), and rudders (foot pedals attached to the vertical stabilizer of the airplane which when pressed move the nose of the airplane to right or left). Coordinating the ailerons and rudders in turns was one of the more difficult skills a pilot had to master. To make flying as simple as driving, one goal was to eliminate the rudders.

When Phoebe had a chance to fly Weick's prototype, she was eager to find out if the flaps could be made to act as rudimentary rudders, eliminating the need to fly with both feet. Flaps, an innovation on the W-1, were control surfaces on the trailing edge of the wings, next to the ailerons, that were used to increase lift at low speeds. While the plane wallowed a bit, she thought it would be possible, with some modifications, to link the left pedal to the flaps to act in place of rudders, the right pedal to act as a brake on the ground, and the throttle linked to a steering wheel to make the plane more like an automobile. Her suggestions, though, fell on deaf ears. Though she had an abundance of flying experience, and the self-confidence that went with it, her ideas were often dismissed by her colleagues for two reasons: she was not an aeronautical engineer and she was not a man. She would have to figure out her own way to test her theory.
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Once the specifications for the low-cost prototype had been developed by the NACA engineers at Langley, Gene Vidal announced the opening of bids. The new planes had to be simple and safe with low maintenance and operating costs, with greater visibility and ease of control. Among the requirements were a landing speed of thirty-five and top speed of not less than 110 miles per hour, a cruising range of at least 300 miles at twenty to twenty-five miles per gallon of fuel. Winning designs would feature an all-metal fuselage, dual controls, be capable of clearing an obstacle thirty-five feet high from a standing start 800 feet away and stopping within 400 feet upon landing, and be easily controlled on the ground.
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While the award was ostensibly to replace flying equipment for the bureau's field personnel,
the unusually detailed specifications required were clearly “part of the program on behalf of a safer, easily operated, low-priced airplane for private use.”
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Fourteen manufacturers submitted bids with prices ranging from $750 to $6,670. The low bid of $750 “created astonishment” until it turned out that the bid had come from a tavern owner in Indianapolis with no manufacturing experience. The remaining bids began at $1,650.
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There were two major impediments to a lower cost, bureau spokesman John H. Geisse indicated: the high cost of engines and the impact of volume production. A contract for fifteen to twenty airplanes at $3,190 each was awarded to the Hammond Aircraft Corporation of Ypsilanti, Michigan, whose design came closest to meeting the NACA specifications. The Hammond was remarkably similar to the W-1, a low-wing pusher-type monoplane, capable of 110 miles per hour, with tricycle landing gear featuring a steerable nose wheel with brakes.
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When the first Hammond arrived in Washington, Phoebe was one of three individuals from the Bureau of Air Commerce permitted to fly it.
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One Saturday, after demonstrating the airplane to an influential congressman, she enlisted one of the mechanics to help her block the rudder on the Hammond. She took it up for a test flight and found, with a few minor adjustments, that it worked perfectly. Monday morning, she reported to her boss, Gene Vidal, what she had done. Vidal checked it out for himself. Then he invited the press to Bolling Field the following Sunday.
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Vidal met the press with his young son, Gore, by his side, telling them that he wanted to prove that a ten-year-old child could fly the Hammond. Vidal told his son that he “was to take off, circle the field once, and land.” After landing, father and son climbed out and Vidal asked, “How was it?” Gore responded, “It's easier than learning how to ride a bicycle.”
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Vidal asked Phoebe to share her ideas for the rudder-less Hammond with a visitor she later learned had bought the company. In 1936, Lloyd Stearman teamed up with Dean Hammond, moved the company to San Francisco and developed an improved version of the Hammond Y, the Y-1-S, which featured a two-control flight system that relied upon differential aileron movement and eliminated the need for rudders.
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While enjoying her high profile as a participant in exciting aviation innovations, Phoebe had to proceed cautiously. She was fighting a rear-guard action against an issue as old as time: the limitations of her gender. Besides her marginalization by the engineers, she also had to contend with a press determined to emphasize her gender over her competence. Despite her repeated insistence in the press that “there is no prejudice whatever against
women in aviation,” she confronted almost daily instances of discrimination in her work and in media coverage. Many stories gave more space to her physical appearance and assurances of her femininity than what she had to say about aviation policy. Despite her position as a spokesperson for a male-dominated industry in a male-defined governmental position, or more likely because of it, newspaper copy persisted in reassuring their readers that Phoebe Omlie was hardly different from the typical American housewife. “[T]his plump, fresh-complexioned little person with her unaffected simplicity and frank indifference to clothes and cosmetics … looks like the kind of woman that a hard-working husband could expect to find waiting home evenings in a ruffled pink apron.” Lest they find a woman in such a position to be too independent, readers were assured of her happy marriage to “good looking Capt. Vernon C. Omlie.”
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Maneuvering within these limitations, Phoebe used her public voice to encourage women's involvement in aviation while at the same time employing gender conventions of the day to insist that women accept a sex-limited place. Women would never be suitable for flying heavy commercial transport aircraft, she insisted. Instead, they should seek futures in more gender-friendly areas like airplane design.

I do not believe that there is a future in aviation for women flying U.S. air mail planes for the same reason that we do not see women at the throttle of express train engines, at the helms of our ocean liners or driving our big transportation busses. But I do believe there is a great future for women in aeronautics in the field of aircraft design and in the executive angle of manufacturing. If you stop to think of it, most of the present day air comforts have been inaugurated because women have demanded them, just as they did in the automotive world.
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Helen Richey's experience was certainly a lesson in limitations for women in aviation. Richey had over 1,000 hours of accident-free flying experience and a women's endurance record of nine days and twenty-two hours in the air, set with Frances Marsalis in 1933. The following year she won the featured event in the Women's National Air Meet, held in Dayton, Ohio, after women had been excluded from the National Air Races in 1934.
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In December 1934, Richey was hired by Central Airlines, a new airmail and passenger line serving Detroit, Cleveland, Pittsburgh, and Washington, D.C. With her first flight as copilot of a Ford Trimotor flying from Washinton, D.C., to Detroit, Richey achieved a place in what she called “the last
masculine stronghold of aviation, the cockpit of a passenger airliner.”
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She became the first woman to fly the mail and the first woman to hold a regular flying job with an airline. “I think this is the beginning of a number of girl co-pilots,” Richey optimistically told the press, but “only time can tell if women will be accepted as first-string pilots.”
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She was not long in finding out. The Airline Pilots' Association rejected her application for union membership and threatened to strike if Helen continued to fly. Putting pressure on the Regulations division of the Department of Commerce, the pilots association contended that a woman did not have the physical strength to handle an airliner in rough weather. The department dutifully issued an order limiting Richey to daytime flying in clear weather. After that, Richey spent most of her time making speeches to luncheon groups, giving press interviews, and posing for photographs. She found herself doing too much public relations and not enough flying. After making only about a dozen flights in ten months in the face of constant hostility from the male pilots, Richey resigned in November 1935.
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A month later, thirty members of the Bureau of Air Commerce's medical division declared unanimously that women were “not physically or psychologically suited for flying a regular run.” Moreover, for parts of each month, women were not suited to fly at all.
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Their conclusions were based upon an article in the
Journal of Aviation Medicine
, which stated that, out of ten women who had been killed while flying, eight were menstruating.
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Carroll Cone, assistant director of the Bureau of Air Commerce in charge of Air Regulations called Phoebe into his office to announce that women must be grounded during those nine-day periods. It would be her job to write the appropriate regulations. Phoebe immediately raised two problems with such a move: there was only sketchy and inadequate information about the issue (all Cone had was the article) and the enforcement of such regulations would be extremely difficult. Hoping to stave off hasty action, she proposed research to gather more information upon which to base such a weighty decision.
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During a subsequent trip to California on NACA business, Phoebe met with the Los Angeles chapter of the Ninety-Nines to try to plan strategy for responding to the threat. After Ninety-Nines vice president Gladys O'Donnell, who presided at the meeting, said her organization wanted nothing to do with the issue, Phoebe turned to Pancho Barnes, who offered her organization, the Women's Air Reserve (WAR). The plan hatched with the WAR was to arrange for their medical officer, Dr. Emma Kittridge, to be appointed as a Department of Commerce examining doctor and help to
gather the data needed. Phoebe used a similar strategy when she returned east. After she encountered similar resistance from the Ninety-Nines in New York, she located Dr. Clara Gross of New York, who was associated with the Women's Medical College in Philadelphia and had expressed interest in being involved in the research project.
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In August, Pancho headed for Washington, D.C., with six of her WAR fliers in three open-cockpit biplanes in what they billed as the “first cross-country formation flight of women pilots” to testify with Dr. Kittridge before the bureau regarding equal pilot licensing standards for both men and women. Uneasy with her friend's cavalier use of off-color language, Phoebe provided Pancho with a list of words she was not to use before the committee. Instead, Pancho impishly passed the list to the officials.
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In order to pay the doctors and support the research, Phoebe needed funds. She turned first to her friend, the first lady. At a meeting at the White House, Phoebe presented her plan and proposed budget. Her memo to Mrs. Roosevelt pointed out that heretofore all research done on pilots had been done entirely with men. But “the physiological difference of the sexes has made the problem more complex for women.” The program she was proposing was “in no way intended to limit, by regulation, women's entry into any professional field,” yet research had indicated a need for more study and more information. “Some study has been carried on by the medical profession in regard to the glandular connection with insanity at the time of the menopause,” she wrote, but little was known “regarding the emotional reactions of women during the menstrual period.” Phoebe suggested using women medical examiners to compile data from research and to engage in a series of examinations similar to those used for medical research by the U.S. Army Air Service. Her budget included $4,600 for each of two women medical directors, $23,000 for additional medical personnel (a female doctor and several nurses), $26,000 for equipment, and $52,000 operating funds, for a total of $108,700.
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Mrs. Roosevelt called Josephine Roche, assistant secretary of the Treasury Department in charge of Public Health. Roche explained that all her funds were earmarked by Congress. She suggested Phoebe talk with the only female senator, Senator Hattie Caraway of Arkansas. Phoebe met with the senator in her office and asked her to propose a bill to fund the project. The modest Senator Caraway responded, “You surely don't expect me to get up on the floor of the Senate and ask for such a fund.” Phoebe similarly came up dry in her pleas to General Westover, chief of the Army Air Corps, who offered to hunt up any extant research on women, but no funds.
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