Almost Earhart
NY gal eyed solo history before her pal Amelia
When Charles Lindbergh made his historic transatlantic flight from New York to Paris in 1927, he became a star. But Ruth Nichols, 26, wasn’t all that impressed. She knew she could do it, too. The New York native would spend the next four years defying her blue-blood parents to become the most accomplished female pilot in the US. She flew nonstop from New York to Miami, in white knickers and a lavender sweater. She traveled solo from New York to California and back. She held records for speed, altitude and distance for an aviatrix. And she was poised to become the first woman to fly alone across the Atlantic.
But bad luck, poor timing and a horrific crash changed her fate.
“If she had succeeded [in her transatlantic flight] . . . we may have had schools, streets and airports named after Ruth Nichols,” said Keith O’Brien, author of the new book “Fly Girls: How Five Daring Women Defied All Odds and Made Aviation History” (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt), out Tuesday. Instead, Nichols watched as her frenemy Amelia Earhart beat her to the punch, flying solo to Europe and into history books.
Yet the “flying debutante,” as the press dubbed Nichols, “was critically important to the history of aviation in this country,” O’Brien told The Post. “More accomplished in 1931 than Amelia Earhart.”
Nichols was born in 1901 on the Upper East Side to a Wall Street trader and an heiress, before moving to a mansion to the Westchester city of Rye, where they had servants and a driver. She enrolled in flying lessons after her father had gifted her a plane ride in Atlantic City for her 18th birthday.
“I felt my soul was completely freed from my earthly body,” she would later say of the experience.
She was a natural, and after graduating from Wellesley College in 1924, she became the first licensed woman seaplane pilot. But by the time of Lindbergh’s flight, she was 26, working at the women’s department at a bank on 42nd Street and living with her parents in Rye.
That’s when her old instructor, Harry Rogers, contacted her. He and a friend were making the first nonstop flight from New York to Miami — would Nichols like to join as their glamorous girl Friday?
The plan went off without a hitch, and reporters were smitten with the socialite. Fairchild Aircraft hired her to be a “flying salesgirl,” her face plastered on ads across the country.
Though the Wright Brothers built their first flying machine in the early 1900s, aviation was still a nascent, and very dangerous, sport in the late 1920s. In 1928, there were fewer than a dozen female pilots, O’Brien said.
But those “fly girls” stuck together. In 1928, Earhart reached out to Nichols, asking about forming an organization for female fliers. The duo would plan impromptu races and sleep at one another’s houses, staying up all night and wrestling on the floor. Earhart even had a nickname for Nichols: Rufus.
“They were friends, but their relationship was complicated,” said O’Brien. Especially after Earhart’s backer had gotten two male pilots to ferry her across the Atlantic in 1928 — making her the first female passenger on such a flight and leading to headlines and parades. “Ruth believed that she was every bit the pilot that Amelia was, and she longed for the attention and the support that Amelia got over the years.”
While Earhart was a bona fide celebrity, with her personal life chronicled in the papers, Nichols was earning press for her airborne feats. Despite the looming Depression, she convinced a benefactor to buy her a gold-winged Lockheed plane, the Akita. She also nabbed a contract with Paramount Studios and began planning her transatlantic flight. On June 22, 1931, Nichols boarded the Akita in Brooklyn, boasting, “The chances are 98 percent in favor of my success.” As she was preparing to land in New Brunswick, Nova Scotia, the sun got in her eyes and she misjudged the length of the runway. She crashed yet managed to drag herself out of the wreckage. She had broken two vertebrae and would spend months in a cast. Nichols lost her endorsements, lecture tours and movie plans.
That October, she arrived in California in her reassembled Akita and declared she would fly “1,900 miles nonstop,” breaking a distance record for a female pilot. She did 2,000, but the next day, as she as she was getting ready to fly to New York, a faulty valve started leaking gas. The Akita exploded in flames.
No one was hurt, but after highprofile pilot deaths and Earhart’s vanishing in 1937, the public turned against women aviators. Nichols found herself unemployable: She was turned down for jobs by nearly every commercial airline. By 1945 she was working in public relations at a hospital in White Plains, and taking pills for depression.
“I think Ruth could get over the crashes and the deaths of her friends,” said O’Brien. “She could even live with the disappearance of Amelia. But she was filled with regret about how close she had come to achieving her dreams.”
Nichols, who never married, took her own life in 1960, overdosing on painkillers in her Midtown apartment. She was 59 years old.
“Despite all the heartbreak, Ruth’s story is inspirational,” he said. “She . . . forged her own path and risked everything. She is a true heroine.”
Ruth believed she was every bit the pilot that Amelia [Earhart]] was. — Author Keith O’Brien on Ruth Nichols