"The trip was as easy as sitting at home in an armchair, and I never had any
doubt of my success."
—Harriet Quimby on her historic Channel flight
On August 1, 1911, at age 36, Harriet Quimby became America's first licensed
woman pilot. Less than a year later she would be dead, victim of the kind of
freakish accident that was all too common in flying's age of innocence. In her
11 months as "America's First Lady of the Air," as the press came to dub her,
she made some dramatic firsts, including her Channel flight, which she
accomplished three years after Louis Blériot's initial crossing. No
doubt she would have gone on to other firsts. Indeed, if death hadn't
intervened on July 1, 1912, she was scheduled within days to fly the U.S. mail
from Boston to New York, a first for a woman.
Rise to fame
Harriet Quimby was probably born in Michigan in 1875. Her father was a
farmer but not very good at it, so he moved his wife and two daughters to
California and tried his luck in other ventures, never flourishingly. His
daughter Harriet would not follow in his faltering footsteps, becoming, long
before she became a pilot, a successful magazine writer first in San Francisco
then in New York. In 1904, at age 29, she became drama critic and editor of the
women's page for Leslie's Illustrated Weekly, a New York magazine for
which she would write for the rest of her brief career, penning more than 300
articles for Leslie's and other publications.
Quimby threw herself into the life of an up-and-coming reporter in the Big
Apple. She was slim, tall, vivacious, and beautiful—one friend called her
"the prettiest girl I have ever seen. She had the most beautiful blue
eyes—oh, what eyes she had." Quimby bought herself an automobile, a sure
sign of prosperity and of her growing passion for technology and speed. She did
not join the suffragist movement then stirring up New York society, but she was
a kind of nonactivist feminist. Many of her articles were about and for
women—"Hints to Stage-Struck Girls" and "Can Women Run Automobiles?" were
but two—and throughout her career Quimby encouraged women to follow all
the pursuits men followed, including dangerous activities like flying. In her
rise to fame, she did not forget her family; she even brought her parents east
to live in New York City.
Smitten with the sky
In 1910, Leslie's devoted an entire issue to aviation. Quimby was so
inspired that she attended an international air meet at New York's Belmont Park
and, by the spring of 1911, was enrolled in a nascent flight school on Long
Island. Her teacher had been a student of Louis Blériot's, and under his
tutelage Quimby excelled. She had both a natural talent for flying and the
drive to prove that women could advance in the field as well as men. "I'm going
in for everything in aviation that men have done: altitude, speed, endurance,
and the rest," she declared. At the same time she remained distinctly feminine,
going aloft in a one-piece, plum-colored satin flying suit and describing
details and sensations that no male flyer would have been caught dead
describing. "You don't know what a fine thing for the complexion a dew bath
is," she once wrote, telling of the pure, moist air at altitude.
Quimby quickly became a celebrity aviatrix, or woman aviator. It was a
lucrative sideline. In September 1911, she earned $1,500 at an air meet, during
which she became the first woman to fly at night. Two months later she flew at
the inauguration festivities for Mexico's president-elect, also earning a tidy
sum. During one flight there, her engine quit in midair, but she kept her cool
and glided to a safe landing. Her calmness drew in part from careful
preparation. "Only a cautious person, man or woman, should fly," she wrote. "I
never mount my machine until every wire and screw has been tested." But it also
came from a desire to push the envelope, which many early aviation pioneers
possessed.
A plan is hatched
It was while in Mexico that Quimby came up with the idea of attempting the
Channel crossing. She told only a few people of her plans, believing that if
word leaked out, another woman might beat her to it. In March 1912, she sailed
for Europe with a letter of introduction to Louis Blériot. She hoped to
purchase a new 70-horsepower Blériot XI for the crossing and then bring
it back to America with her. When they met, Blériot told her that that
model was not yet ready, so Quimby convinced him to loan her a 50-hp
Blériot XI for the attempt while her 70-hp plane was being built.
Quimby began to think the worst—she might have to ditch the plane in the Channel.
She then traveled with Blériot to the village of Hardelot on the French
coast, where he had a hangar. She wished to make some test flights, but the
weather remained ugly for days. Fearing she would miss her Channel opportunity,
Quimby secretly shipped the plane to Dover, England—she wanted to fly
from England to France, rather than the other way around as Blériot had
done, because she felt the cliffs at Dover were dauntingly higher.
Will of steel
The morning of her flight, April 16, 1912, dawned foggy, with wind sure to come
up. The dicey weather was just one of many reasons a less determined person
might have reconsidered the flight. The Blériot XI was by all accounts
the trickiest plane Blériot had yet designed, and Quimby had never
piloted the model, much less the particular plane Blériot had loaned
her. She had never flown long-distance over water and had never used a compass,
which Gustav Hamel, a British pilot who was at her side that morning, had just
taught her to use and insisted she bring with her. Several flyers had lost
their lives trying to make the crossing, and Hamel reminded her that if she
flew just five miles off course, she could disappear in the frigid Channel,
never to return (he himself later did just that).
Hamel even offered to don Quimby's satin suit and fly in her stead, secretly
switching places with her after landing in France. But such an offer touched a
nerve in Quimby, as did the suspicion about her resolution that she sensed in
the crowd gathered on the white cliffs that morning. "I was annoyed from the
start by the attitude of doubt on the part of the spectators that I would never
really make the flight," she later wrote. "They knew I had never used the
machine before and probably thought I would find some excuse at the last moment
to back out of the flight. This attitude made me more determined than ever to
succeed." She did permit Hamel to take the plane on a test flight, and she
accepted a hot water bottle that someone thrust into her hands.
History in the air
At 5:30 a.m., she took off. The sky overhead was clear, but the French coast,
which two days before had been clearly visible 22 miles away across the
Channel, was now completely obscured by a fog bank. Quimby circled up to 1,500
feet, flew straight over Dover Castle, and made a beeline towards France. "The
fog quickly surrounded me, like a cold, wet, gray blanket," she later wrote. To
try to clear it, she ascended to 6,000 feet, where the mist, she remembered,
"felt like tiny needles on my skin." The hot water bottle did little to warm
her up, and her head began to ache from the strain of concentrating on the
compass to keep her course.
After flying for the better part of an hour in deep fog, she decided she had
better descend and look for an opening in the mist. As she lowered the nose in
descent, gasoline flooded the engine, which began backfiring. It was a design
flaw that had already cost several flyers their lives. Quimby began to think
the worst—she might have to ditch the plane in the Channel. "To my great
relief," she wrote later, "the gasoline quickly burned away and my engine began
an even purr."
She looked at her watch—her only other instrument besides the
compass—and determined she must be close to her destination. Sure enough,
the Blériot XI soon broke free of the cloud bank and there below lay a
white-sand beach and, beyond it, green farmland—France. Not wishing to
tear up the nicely tilled fields, she landed on the beach. Her flight had
lasted one hour and nine minutes.
For a minute she found herself utterly alone amidst the enormous silence that
followed the shutting down of her engine. But then she was surrounded by
excited fishermen and their wives and children, all carrying pails of
sandworms. It turns out she was only two miles from Hardelot, where
Blériot housed the plane she had just flown, and these people had
immediately realized what she'd achieved.
By a strange twist of fate, no banner headlines followed Quimby's historic
feat, because just two days before the "unsinkable" Titanic had gone down in
the North Atlantic, with more than 1,500 lives lost. Quimby's achievement was
all but overshadowed. Nor did she receive much fanfare in New York upon her
return to America in May. Just two weeks before, over 20,000 suffragists had
marched up Fifth Avenue, and New York's mostly male leadership was still
reeling from the event.
Tragedy in the sky
But fame came to her nonetheless, and Quimby hardly had time to worry anyway.
Her new 70-hp Blériot XI had arrived from Europe, and she saw the white
monoplane, along with her new-found stardom, as her ticket to financial
independence. Indeed, her manager had lined up a seven-day event for which the
"Queen of the Channel Crossing," as she was now billed, would be paid the
astronomical amount of $100,000. It was the Boston Air Meet, held on a
peninsula southeast of the city, and it was on the last day of the
meet—her first public appearance since the crossing—that she was to
fly the mail to New York.
That flight never occurred. One late afternoon, Quimby took the manager of the
meet, one William Willard, up in her two-seat plane for a run out over
Dorchester Bay. Moments before the flight, she had laughingly assured reporters
clustered around her that a forced landing in the bay was not part of her
plans. "I have no intention of coming down in the water," she said. "I'm a cat,
and I don't like the water." Quimby was never above tempting fate, and this
time it arguably worked against her.
“Flying is a fine, dignified sport for women, it is healthy and
stimulates the mind.”
As the pair returned from circling the Boston Light far out in the bay, the sky
had turned a dazzling orange. Five thousand spectators watched as the monoplane
approached over the tidal flats, strikingly silhouetted against the blazing
sky. Without any warning, the plane's tail suddenly rose sharply, and Willard
was pitched from the plane. The two-passenger Blériot was known for
having balance problems, and without Willard in the rear seat, the plane became
gravely destabilized.
For a moment it seemed that Quimby was regaining control of the plane. But then
it canted forward sharply again, and this time Quimby herself was thrown out.
The crowd watched in horror as the two plunged a thousand feet to their deaths
in the harbor. Ironically, the plane righted itself and landed in the shallow
water with minimal damage.
Quimby was 37 years old.
Postscript
An explanation of what likely happened appeared the following August in
Aircraft magazine. The Blériot XI featured a horizontal tail wing
that was meant to help offer longitudinal stability to the two-passenger plane.
But when the aircraft nosed down beyond a certain angle, the tail surface could
provide unwanted lift that increased with plane speed until a critical moment
was reached. At that point, wrote the article's author, "it is impossible to
get the tail down though the elevator stick is pulled back. The faster the
machine dives, the more lift the tail provides until it has the plane in a
vertical position, hurling the pilot and passenger out (unless they are
strapped in)."
Quimby and Willard, alas, were not strapped in. Seat-belt use was a thing of
the future—only a few European pilots had begun to wear them.
Before she had traveled to Boston, Quimby had left a sealed note for her
parents in New York. If bad luck should befall her, she wrote, she wanted them
to know that she would meet her fate "rejoicing." Quimby died doing what she
loved, and in her demonstrative but ever feminine way, she was one of
aviation's true pioneers.
Perhaps her greatest contribution was to give courage to women who wished to
take to the air. "Men flyers have given the impression that aeroplaning is very
perilous work, something an ordinary mortal should not dream of attempting,"
she once wrote, "but when I saw how easy men flyers handle their machines, I
said I could fly. Flying is a fine, dignified sport for women, it is healthy
and stimulates the mind."
|
Ready to fly: Harriet Quimby in her Blériot XI
monoplane, 1912.
| |
Dressed to the nines in high heels and
satin suit, Quimby climbs into her Moisant monoplane, the model she learned to
fly on.
| |
A picture of femininity and
fearlessness: Quimby cranking the propeller.
| |
Quimby, in this autographed photo, sits in
the plane she flew across the English Channel.
| |
In this shot photographed from a newspaper, Quimby
is lifted aloft just after landing in France on April 16, 1912.
| |
A group of men, including Quimby's flight
instructor (right), examine her downed monoplane following her tragic accident.
The plane had flipped over onto its back after landing in Dorchester Bay.
| |
|