First Woman in Flight: Harriet Quimby
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.
Using the money she had won in an aerial race, she brought her plane to England for the Channel crossing. That now done, she was off to Boston, Massachusetts, for another aerial competition.
In the stunning sun on the first of July, Dorchester Bay sparkled with light as the aircraft slowly gained altitude. The engine labored under the added weight of a passenger. Quimby had told the heavy-set man not to shift his weight once they were airborne. They sput-sputtered around the lighthouse until she could see the small, dark, landing strip bouncing around through the shiny, spinning, propeller blade.
Flaps down.
Quimby was on final approach.
At that moment , the large man moved. The plane seasawed back and forth, then turned upside down. immediately , two dots appeared and plunged downward, faster and faster, becoming tiny splashes in the vast ocean. One of those splashes was Harriet Quimby.
Miraculously, the small plane righted itself – without its pilot, and made a near-perfect landing. It turned around on the runway, came back a short way, and stopped facing the sea. The wings waved slightly in the breeze as the engine sputtered , then died. It coughed one final puff of white smoke that rose in wisps toward the bright blue sky, fading as it went.
Courageous, young Harriet Quimby, with little more than a box kite pulled by a primitive engine, had set world records. It was decades before Amelia Earhart and Charles Lindbergh would capture the media with their daring in modern aircraft. Quimby had not only challenged the sky, but also had laughed at it. She left the tales of her courage not for screaming headlines, but to be told only in the wind whispers of a wind-swept ocean.
