New Haven Register (Sunday) (New Haven, CT)
Bridgeport native, 101, recreates her flight with Amelia Earhart
STRATFORD — Anne Fiyalka, 101, said flying with Amelia Earhart on Nov. 5, 1936 was an experience she will never forget.
She remembers Earhart spoke to her class at Warren Harding High School in Bridgeport after the flight.
“She said this: “It's not only a man's world, it's a woman's world as well,” Fiyalka said.
Many things in her life have changed since Earhart, a groundbreaking aviator flew a then 15-year-old Fiyalka on that day.
But one thing stayed the same — Fiyalka's fascination with taking to the skies.
She recreated her 1936 flight on Friday at Sikorsky Memorial Airport, with the plane circling around the coast by Stratford. She went up to the sky remembering the words Earhart told her after the flight, saying she continues to be inspired by her example to women.
Although she used a walker to get to the hanger, Fiyalka didn't need much help getting into the plane, a modern turboprop plane filled with modern aviation technology piloted by another woman pilot, Nicole Marsillio.
Marsillio said she jumped at the chance to fly Fiyalka when she heard she had flown with Earhart.
“To fly with someone that flew with Amelia Earhart, as a female pilot I was blown away and couldn't wait to take her up and make the dream come true of finally going up again,” Marsillio said.
Marsillio got on board with Fiyalka and several members of Three Wing Aviation, a Stratford-based company that includes a flight school and maintenance division.
Marsillio started the engine, the propeller spinning as it taxied onto the runway. It flew off shortly after into the blue sky, where it made a trip along the coast. While the plane also has a propeller, much
has changed since Fiyalka's flight 85 years ago.
Commercial aviation was a luxury in 1936; Fiyalka was one of the few who had ever been on a plane at the time. A plane trip is now as mundane as a bus trip.
She described the noise of the interior cabin on her trip in 1936. Now passengers can fly in near silence.
She described the dangers of flight. Pilots at the time had no access to radar or complex navigation tools.
All they had was a compass and maybe communication with a flight tower.
Fiyalka said she flew with Earhart after winning a contest.
This latest trip was also the result of a contest, this time by AARP, which she said grants wishes to centenarians.
“My neighbor submitted my name and they contacted me and they didn't know what my wish would be. So I said, I would wish to go up
in an airplane,” Fiyalka said.
The short flight was courtesy of Three Wing Aviation and the New England Air Museum, in collaboration with Wish of a Lifetime From AARP.
Earhart gained fame as a woman pilot in a country that still denied women the right to open a bank account in their names, hold a government job along with their husbands and denied them access to an abortion, which later on, briefly became a constitutional right
lasting 50 years — until Friday's Supreme Court decision to overturn Roe v. Wade put that in question.
Fiyalka said she doesn't follow politics. But she heard about the decision.
“I'm not much into politics, but I was really disappointed myself,” Fiyalka said.
But Fiyalka earlier said she remembered what Earhart said, that it's a woman's world too and her words are words to live by.
“We women have to live by that motto,” she said.