HIGH-FLYING LIFE OF ELINOR SMITH
This ace blazed path for women omen (and, nno, it’s not Amelia)
JUST two months after Elinor Smith became, at 17, the youngest licensed pilot, she attempted a stunt no pilot had done before — or since.
On Oct. 21, 1928, she flew a small plane under the Queensboro, Williamsburg, Manhattan and Brooklyn bridges. All because a male acquaintance, who tried unsuccessfully to fly under the nearby Hell Gate Bridge, said she couldn’t.
“It was a slick piece of flying, requiring expert piloting and technical knowledge,” Smith, who died of kidney failure in 2010 at age 98, recounted in her 1981 memoir, “Aviatrix.”
Her course was challenging. She aimed first for the Queensboro Bridge, where a yacht blocked her preferred entry near Roosevelt Island, making her reroute and glide toward the Queens-side anchorage, where wooden blocks suspended from cables forced her to drop to just 10 feet above the river.
Next came the Williamsburg and Manhattan bridges, without incident. But at the Brooklyn Bridge, a Navy destroyer unexpectedly came into view — reducing her airspace between it and a tanker heading south — forcing Smith to flip the plane sideways to squeeze between them and complete her path.
“It’s stunning [she did] that on an instant’s notice,” Patrick H. Sullivan, 80, one of Smith’s three surviving children and a licensed pilot, told The Post.
When Smith returned to Long Island’s Curtiss Field, she told a Post reporter the feat was “easy.”
Though Smith was grounded for 15 days by the Department of Commerce, charged with “freak and stunt flying in congested areas,” this flight would propel her into an illustrious career, one marked by records set in endurance, altitude and speed.
But it would end prematurely, leading to decades of obscurity once Smith’s contemporary Amelia Earhart overshadowed her legacy.
“She had her moment in the sun, and it didn’t last,” says Dorothy Cochrane, curator for general aviation at the National Air and Space Museum. “[They say] you’re only as good as your last record — and it’s true.”
SMITH, the elder of two children, was born in Freeport, LI, on Aug. 17, 1911. Her father, Tom, was a Vaudeville headliner; her mother, Agnes, a former singer, became a stay-athome parent.
Smith took her first flight at age 7. While on a Sunday drive through Hicksville with her father and brother, Joe, they spotted a sign alongside an abandoned farm advertising plane rides for $5 and pulled over. The whole family boarded the plane, a Farman pusher.
“Shafts of sunlight streamed down through broken clouds, turning the drab truck farms below into a fairyland of gilded greens and golds,” Smith recalled of the trip.
“That’s one of the things that’s so special about [Smith],” said journalist and author Theasa Tuohy, 83, who in May published “Flying Jenny,” a fictional work based on Smith’s 1928 bridge flight. “She was captivated [by flying] by the time she was a small child.”
Her father, also enamored with aviation, bought the small Waco airplane that Smith would fly under the bridges. As a girl, Smith desperately wanted to use it for formal training. Despite her pleas, her parents wouldn’t allow it. Only at age 13, with her father performing in Chicago, Smith began taking lessons in Wantagh — driving 45 minutes there without a license — before school.
“But you have to be [back] in time to get a shower and get on your bike and ride to school!” her mother would say, according to Sullivan.
Smith had yet to fly unattended, but at age 15 — having already learned complicated maneuvers, including forced landings on narrow strips of beach — she heard of two 17-year-old girls in California who took solo flights. Wanting to prove herself, Smith begged her mother to let her fly alone. Once again, her mother surrendered, allowing her to command a solo flight from Wantagh to Roosevelt Field (then a bustling aviation hub). After an easy landing, Smith became the youngest woman in the world to fly alone — and soon had her eyes on the ultimate prize.
“Becoming a professional pilot was for me the most desirable goal in the world, and I was not going to allow age or sex to bar me from it,” Smith wrote. T ODAY, according to Women in Aviation International, there are nearly 43,000 female pilots in America — some 7 percent of the total number of pilots in the nation. But in the early 20th century, it was impossible for women to forge careers in aviation.
That wouldn’t change until the 1970s, when female military pilots were allowed to fly in noncombative roles. (The ban on female combat pilots was lifted in 1991.) In 1973, Emily Howell Warner became the first permanent female pilot for a US airline.
During Smith’s time, flying “was considered unfeminine,” Cochrane said. “People doubted women had expertise, and they weren’t allowed in the paying jobs of the era.”
The best women could do was set aviation records (not solely for prestige, but also to help manufacturers prove the safety of their aircraft) and take on odd-job piloting gigs — both of which Smith did in spectacular fashion.
“I would have to upgrade the image of a kid flying her pop’s [plane] under a quartet of bridges,” Smith wrote in her memoir.
So on Jan. 30, 1929, at agege 17, she broke the women’s solo endur-endurance record by spending 133 hours and 16 minutes flying an open-opencockpit plane over Long Island. sland. Quickly beat by Evelyn “Bobbi” Trout by four hours, then Lou-Louise Thaden by nine hours, ours, Smith reclaimed the titlee on April 24, 1929, with a 26-hour, our, 21-minute solo endurance flight.
“I think I’ll fly to Rome! ”me!” Smith told the New York Telegram after landing at Roosevelt Field.
In 1930, the year Smith was voted Woman Pilot of the Year at age 19, she set an altitude record of 27,418 feet. In 1932, she set a straightcourse speed record forfor women by zooming 22929 mph.
“She would rarely talk about the danger,” said Sullivan. “I think she was too young to assess it.”
All told, Smith broke at least six records between 1929 and 1932. She would
become the first female test pilot for Fairchild Aviation Corp. and Bellanca Aircraft Corp., and as the first woman executive pilot for Irvin Air Chute Co.Co., she demonstrated st rated pa parachute drops. There were endorsements for motor oil and goggles, even a job with NBC Radio to cover air races. Later, in 1934, she would become the first woman to appear on a Wheaties box, albeit on the back. “[Smith] pushed boundaries as far as she could at that time — because there weren’t many opportunities for women,” saisaid Cochrane.
DESPITE all her accomplishments, the parade eventually passed her by.
Smith would not become the first woman to pilot a solo trans-Atlantic flight — despite receiving funding from an anonymous female donor to hop from Newfoundland to Ireland.
“I don’t think I will have any trouble reaching Dublin in time for tea,” she told The Post in an article dated April 21, 1932.
But she would be beat by Amelia Earhart, who flew that exact path on May 20, 1932.
The two women had long been competitive: Smith thought she was the more skilled pilot — and even insinuated that Earhart was a cheat.
In her memoir, Smith detailed a 1929 meeting with Earhart’s publicist and husband, George P. Putnam, in which he allegedly offered Smith a paid “mechanic” position to pilot a cross-country race with Earhart in the plane, but have it appear that Earhart had flown it herself.
Though the overwhelming consensus among aviation historians is that Earhart didn’t cheat, she certainly was savvier at marketing her feats.
“I don’t think Elinor was ever really known internationally,” said Cochrane, adding that Earhart always had a publicist at her side. “Elinor went a different way and couldn’t get that publicity.”
There are other reasons why Smith faded into relative obscurity.
In February 1931, appearing before the state Assembly Committee to advocate for the removal of electrical wires within 1,000 feet of airports, she met the bill’s sponsor, Assemblyman Patrick H. Sullivan, whom she quietly wed in July 1933. He wasn’t a fan of her flying.
“My father never told you what to do,” said the younger Sullivan. “He would’ve said to her, ‘I’m a little concerned about this — I’d rather you didn’t do altitude flights again.’ She loved the guy to pieces . . . If he said it, she’d do it.”
The risks also began to catch up with her. In October 1931, Smith — attempting to stand in the cockpit while descending into Brooklyn’s Floyd Bennett Field — fell from the plane and was knocked unconscious. In September 1933, Smith nearly caused a collision after a sharp turn over Governors Island put her in the path of two planes.
“I think it began to dawn on her that what she was doing was life-threatening,” said Sullivan.
So, at 29, Smith retired to raise a family. Patrick’s eldest sister Patsy, 82, lives in Manhattan. The youngest, Pamela, 74, resides in Glen Cove, LI. Kathleen, the third born, spent years in Australia and died in 2015 at 74.
“When [Smith] was flying, it was all about flying,” said Sullivan, who lives in California. “When she was a wife and mother, it was all about being a wife and mother.”
Smith would return to flying, though not with the same vigor, after her husband’s atherosclerosis-related death in 1956. She would fly with the Air Force Association, though never solo because her piloting licenses had expired. In 2000, at 89, she would complete a simulated shuttle landing at a NASA facility in California.
Her efforts in the 1950s and 1960s to secure Long Island’s place in the history of aviation led to the founding of Garden City’s Cradle of Aviation Museum in 1980.
Though she never became a household name, Smith led a life worth celebrating, Sullivan says. “She wanted young girls to know that you can do this. I would like her to be known as someone who did.”