First Woman in Flight: Harriet Quimby

Paved the Way for Women in Aviation

Harriet Quimby was lost. 

Flying in dangerous, April, storm clouds without benefit of instruments, she could only hope she was still over the English Channel. 

What if her calculations were wrong? Suppose instead of heading toward the coast of France, she was using her dwindling fuel supply to carry her farther and farther out to sea? Then a crash into the deep waters of a raging ocean was only moments away. 

The engine sput-sputtered a warning. Quimby, a slight woman, her short black hair whipping in the wind, tightened a black-gloved fist around the control stick. Taking a deep breath, she whispered something softly, then jammed the stick forward. The tiny craft dropped like a rock. 

The engine began to scream as it picked up speed; the propellar seemingly spun in both directions faster. Something ripped. Wing fabric? The rip became a flapping sound, like a snapping flag in a fierce wind. Would the wings stay on? 

Punching through the last layer of clouds, Quimby tried to pull the stick back. The plane shuddered. Something was wrong. The channel wasn't where it was supposed to be. 

IT WAS TOO CLOSE! 

Pull up, pull up. She pulled back harder on the stick. With the propeller slicing through the peaks of white-capped waves, the plane leveled off. Moments later, as Quimby tried to wipe her goggles, a patch of brown, sandy beach flashed by under her wing, then melted into green squares of rolling pasture. Fuel depleted, the engine snapped to a halt. In the eerie silence, Quimby set the plane down. Stunned French villagers, many of whom had never seen a plane before, watched the descent. One can only imagine what they thought as the silent craft dropped from a stormy sky with a woman at the controls.
Now Quimby, the first woman in U.S. history to have earned a pilot's license, was also the first woman to fly across the English Channel. 

It was 1912. 

Quimby, formerly a journalist from California, had moved to New York in 1903 to become a drama critic. This left her the time she needed to learn to fly. She began taking lessons just after the historic flight of the Wright Brothers.