Names to Remember
On 1 August 1911, Harriet Quimby, a journalist-turned-aviator, received Aero Club of America license number 37, thereby becoming the first licensed woman pilot in the United States.
Nervous at the prospect of approving a flying license for a female, Aero Club officials suffered through a brief siege of soul-searching before taking the historic step. In those early years of the 20th century, women were simply not supposed to step out of character by knocking on the doors of new fields of endeavour. Female invasion of such a male dominated pursuit as aviation seemed especially questionable. However, there was no escaping the fact that the fair Harriet had indeed done her homework and met the requirements of the day. Instructor Andre Houpert of the Moisant Aviation School at Nassau Boulevard, Garden City, Long Island, NY, had soloed Quimby after 33 lessons spanning four months and involving four and a half hours of flight in a 30-hp Blériot-type monoplane. At that point Quimby decided to try for her license.
Her review board consisted of two judges from the Aero Club, the licensing agency in the United States under authority of the Federation Aeronautique Internationale. To achieve her license, she had to land her plane within 100 feet of where she left the ground. Her first attempt fell short, but on the next day she set her craft down only seven feet, nine inches from the mark and qualified for the coveted certificate. She thus became the second woman in the world to receive a pilot’s license, the Baroness Raymonde de la Roche of France having received hers in 1910.
An aura of mystery surrounds Harriet Quimby’s early years. It was generally believed that she was born into wealth on an orange plantation in Arroyo Grande, California in 1884 and enjoyed a private school education in America and Europe. Quimby began writing in 1902 for the Dramatic Review in San Francisco and wrote features for the city’s newspapers, The Call and The Chronicle. She also wrote for Leslie’s Weekly, a popular magazine of the time and in 1906 moved to New York as that magazine’s drama critic.
Her interest in aviation dated to her attendance in January 1910 at the Los Angeles International Aviation Meet, the first air meet in the United States. It soared to enthusiasm in October that year when she attended a big international air meet at Belmont Park, New York, the nation’s third such meet (after the Harvard-Boston meet a month earlier). At Belmont Park, Harriet marvelled at the ‘birdmen-heroes’ perched on the wings of their Curtiss, Wright and Farman biplanes, or seated half-in and half out of the cockpits of the faster Blériot and Antoinette monoplanes.
Already ‘an ardent sportswoman and expert autoist’, Quimby decided to take the next natural step into adventure and learn to fly. That evening when she happened to see Moisant having dinner at the Hotel Astor, she asked him to teach her to fly. He agreed, possibly not really taking her seriously. Quimby did not abandon the idea, even when Moisant died as his monoplane plunged to earth at an air meet in New Orleans on 1 December 1910.
John Moisant left a legacy, the Moisant Aviation School, which opened in April 1911. It was there that Harriet Quimby enrolled in the summer of 1911, entering a friendly competition with Moisant’s sister, Mathilde, for the honour of becoming the nation’s first licensed woman pilot. Both flew Moisant monoplanes, copies of the famous Blériot design. Mathilde received her license on 17 August 1911, to become this country’s second licensed woman aviator.
Would her bosses at Leslie’s frown at their drama critic’s unwomanly activities? Quimby dodged the question by taking her flight lessons at dawn and concealing her femininity in a flying suit and face-shielding hood. The secret was short-lived, especially after her first solo flight and license award when she accepted an invitation to join the Moisant International Aviators, an exhibition team. Shortly after receiving her license, Quimby won headlines by making a moonlight flight over Staten Island, New York, to the amazement of a crowd of 20,000, a feat for which she received $1,500. During a meet at the Nassau Boulevard airfield in September 1911, she beat the leading French aviatrix, Helene Dutrieu, in a cross-country race, winning $600.
The following month, having added to her experience in several large exhibitions with the Moisant group, she teamed up with Mathilde Moisant on a flying tour of Mexico. She flew over Mexico City, the first woman to do so, as part of the inauguration ceremonies for President Francisco Madero. A secret no longer, Quimby’s flying had won the approval of her journalistic bosses at Leslie’s Weekly. She continued to contribute to Leslie’s and wrote an account of her Mexican tour for that magazine.
If her flying feats made it difficult to ignore Harriet Quimby, her personality and dainty elegance made it even more so. Spectacular was the word on all counts. The few photographs available, though hardly doing her full justice, provide a hint of her grace and good looks. From all accounts she was, as the columnist noted, ‘a glamorous, green-eyed beauty.’
When her writing and flying activities failed to absorb all her energies, Quimby found herself tempted by another aeronautical ‘first’, a flight across the English Channel. Since Louis Blériot had first flown the Channel on 25 July 1909, other famous male fliers had followed. But no woman, although there were several European female fliers at the time, had dared challenge the Channel. In London, she concluded an agreement with The Mirror to finance her flight at ‘a handsome inducement,’ as she later described it. Meeting Blériot in Paris, she made another wily move, ordering a new 70-hp plane and at the same time arranging to borrow a new 60-hp Blériot for her flight. Both were two-seaters, whilst the borrowed craft was the same general type (Moisant’s ‘copy’) that she had flown in America.
Temporary, but annoying, setbacks followed. She found deplorable weather at the French Channel resort town of Hardelot, where Blériot had a hangar and where she was to practice in her borrowed plane. With flying impossible for days, she returned to England, first arranging to have the untried aircraft shipped in secret to an airfield at Dover. She wanted no woman to beat her to the Channel flight. She confided her plans to a British pilot, Gustav Hamel, who seemingly violated the confidence by flying an English woman, Eleanor Trehawke Davies, across the Channel on 2 April. But Davies had been only a passenger and the far greater glory of flying a plane across remained open to Quimby.
Ironically, Hamel turned up in Dover to help Quimby, flight testing the borrowed Blériot and serving as technical adviser. He stressed the need for constant attention to the plane’s compass, an instrument Quimby had never used before. He warned that even a minor error could send her wandering above the cold expanse of the North Sea. From the outset, Hamel had been unsure of a woman’s ability to fly an aircraft across the Channel. He even suggested that he dress up in Harriet’s satin flying costume, pilot her plane across the Channel and land at a deserted spot where she could meet him, naturally she refused.
It may be difficult today to see why the 22-mile Channel hop could be considered hazardous. Yet it was, and several fliers had already been lost in the attempt. For Quimby, this was her first flight in a Blériot, first with a compass and first across water. Add to that a flimsy plane that warped its wings to turn, an engine that needed prayer as well as fuel and finally, as it turned out, fog that hid the water for much of the flight. Therefore, it was a worried group of friends who saw Quimby off early on the morning of Tuesday, 16 April.
Heavily clad against a chill, damp day, she wore under her satin flying suit, ‘two pairs of silk combinations, over the suit a long woollen coat, over this an American raincoat and around and across my shoulders a long wide stole of sealskin.’ Her friends even pressed on her a hot water bag which Hamel tied to her waist.That Quimby still found space within the Blériot’s cramped cockpit testified to her petite figure. Airborne at 08h58, Quimby climbed in a wide circle above the heights of Dover, reaching 2,000 feet before heading out over the Channel. Before running into a fog bank, she caught a brief glimpse of The Mirror’s rented tugboat, which was jammed with reporters and photographers.
She climbed through the mists to 6,000 feet, seeking clear sky, but found only more mists and ‘a bone-chilling cold.’ She kept a close watch on her compass, recalling Hamel’s warning. Finding no clear air, she nosed the plane down, only to meet more trouble: the nose-down angle flooded the carburettor and the engine began to misfire. She levelled out, preparing to ditch and hoping to pancake into the water as gently as possible, when the engine, to her vast relief, resumed its steady purr.
The little monoplane was flying at 200 feet when it broke into the clear. Though dazzled by the rising sun, Harriet could see the shores of France ahead. She sighted a deserted stretch of beach dead ahead and soon passed over the Cape Grisnez Lighthouse. She flew briefly toward Boulogne and then spiralled down to a landing on a flat, sandy fishing beach where she was quickly surrounded by villagers. By a stroke of luck, she was at Hardelot, not far from the Blériot hangar, about 25 miles south of her planned destination, Calais. Despite the Blériot’s cruise speed of almost 60 miles an hour, the 22-mile crossing had taken nearly an hour because of the climbing and landing spirals, the long, slow ascent to 6,000 feet and the course variation.
Harriet Quimby, now ‘Queen of the Air,’ was feted in London and Paris and returned to the United States as a celebrity on two continents. She performed at air meets throughout the country, occasionally carrying passengers.
In June she entered the 1912 Boston meet to be held at Harvard Field in Squantum on the shores of Dorchester Bay, scene of big international meets in 1910 and 1911. The 1912 meet proved a troubled affair from the start as the management, a group of local promoters, squabbled with the Aero Club of America, the rules maker for such competitive meets.
The meet, which attracted many famous fliers of the time, eventually ended $25,000 in debt and with the licenses of seven aviators suspended for the remainder of the year. Worse, it brought death to two of its key figures.
Monday, 1 July the second flying day of the meet, went quite well, according to the news accounts, ‘with some good flying during the day.’ Just before 18h00 with the competitive events concluded, Quimby took off with a passenger, William A.P. Willard, the meet manager, for a flight around Boston Light, about eight miles away in Boston’s island-dotted outer harbour. Willard, father of Charles F Willard, a noted Curtiss exhibition pilot, had tossed a coin with another son, Harry, two days before to see which would fly first with Quimby. Harry had won and went up for a short flight earlier that day. The elder Willard had been looking forward to his own flight as ‘a great advert for his show,’ in which he had invested heavily with family funds.
After taking off, Quimby and Willard circled the field and headed east toward the Light, climbing to a height of 6,000 feet. Quimby sat in the front cockpit of the new 70-hp Blériot (the craft she had ordered in Paris), the plane’s white wings extending from just below and to either side of her. Willard, a large man of 190 pounds, rode the rear cockpit about three feet behind the pilot. The plane’s center of gravity was forward, at the wings, so Willard’s weight kept the fuselage level, replacing sandbags usually carried to prevent the tail from rising too high when Quimby was flying alone.
Returning from the Light some 20 minutes later, the Blériot descended in a wide circle and, heading eastward, reached a point near the mouth of the Neoponset River, midway between the Squantum and Dorchester shores. The plane, already in a steep glide, suddenly slanted even more sharply down and started a turn to the left, presumably to make its final approach to the field.
Then the unbelievable and horrifying occurred. Willard was seen to hurtle clear over the nose of the plane, followed a second or two later by Quimby. Both plunged into the muddy river 1,000 feet below which, with the tide out, was barely three or four feet. deep. Death was instantaneous. Ironically, the plane recovered from its dive, crash landed in the river and tripped by its landing gear, flipped upside down with only minor damage. It was intact enough for a thorough inspection of its controls.
Quimby’s flying career had spanned a scant 11 months and she was 28 years old when she died. Today we may rightly view the beautiful and vibrant Harriet Quimby as a victim of aviation’s age of innocence. Surely the cards were stacked against America’s onetime ‘Queen of the Air’ and her unsuspecting passenger that sad, summer day.