Category: Air Pilots

Harriet Quimby: America's First Lady of the Air

3/22/2021

Cheryl Harness
She's historical!

A 1991 United States airmail postage stamp featured Harriet Quimby

  Do you know about Harriet Quimby, Pioneer Aviator? In her time, the early 1900s, flying was still so new and dangerous. Every flier risked death whenever he climbed into a cockpit. I say ‘he’ because flying had mostly been a guy thing. That was especially true in Harriet’s time. People thought only a very bold, unladylike female would sign up for flying lessons. Or travel the world taking photos. Or hang around film studios, writing screenplays for silent movies. Or drive her own car. OR become America’s very first woman to earn a pilot’s license, as Harriet did, on August 1, 1911. Harriet did ALL of those things AND wrote newspaper stories about her adventures!

          Like other early fliers, Harriet showed off her skills at very popular airshows. High above the crowds, pilots swooped through the sky in their tiny aircraft, difficult to manage in the windy air. When Louis Blériot made the first flight from France to England, in 1909, it was in a plane measuring 25 feet, 7 inches, wingtip to wingtip. The wingspan of a small plane today might be 36 feet and it weighs more than three times as much as Blériot’s 507-pounder!

Beautiful Harriet Quimby, in her purple satin flight suit, was famous. But she wanted more: If only she could match Mr. Blériot’s feat, she’d be the first woman to fly across the stormy English Channel. So, she borrowed one of Mr. Blériot’s little wood-cloth-and-wire airplanes and had it shipped to Dover, England. At dawn on April 16, 1912, Harriet soared up into the clouds, heading for France, 22 miles away. No GPS, radar, or radio. Just her watch and a compass. After an hour of freezing fog in her face, Harriet flew down out of the clouds to see France’s sandy shores. When she landed, people came rushing from all directions.

          Alas for Harriet. Alas, alas for those on the doomed Titanic which disappeared under the ocean 27 hours before her flight. The terrible news overshadowed her accomplishment. And how could Harriet know that she had but ten weeks to live? On July 1, 1912, the crowd at a Boston airshow heard her screams as she fell from her little airplane to her death. And alas for us if we let time and tragedy overshadow how cool and brave she was: Harriet Quimby, First Lady of the Air.

Harriet Quimby with the Moisant monoplane in which she learned to fly.

Excited fans carry Harriet Quimby after her successful English Channel flight

Cheryl Harness has written a book about another heroic woman, Mary Walker. She was one of the first women doctors in the country. When the Civil War struck, she took to the battlefields in a modified Union uniform as a commissioned doctor. To find out more about Cheryl's book, click here.

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Alberto Santos-Dumont

6/9/2020

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Roxie Munro
Visual Thinker

All art by Roxie Munro

Horse-drawn carriages stopped dead in their tracks. People pointed at the sky. “Look!” they shouted. “There’s Santos in one of his flying machines!” Above, along the Champs–Elysées, sailed a strange-looking contraption: a cigar-shaped balloon under which was mounted a gasoline engine, a large propeller, and, in a wicker basket, a dapper little man with a neatly trimmed moustache, starched collar, and a Panama hat. Spotting an agreeable sidewalk café, he landed his airship and hitched it to a lamppost. Then he calmly ordered his morning cup of coffee

He was Alberto Santos-Dumont, a very short twenty-nine-year-old Brazilian aviator who loved everything high. (His dining table had nine-foot legs with chairs to match. To reach it, his manservant climbed a step stool.)

A year earlier, in 1901, Santos had astounded Parisians with one of the most spectacular feats in early aviation history. A prize of one-hundred thousand francs had been offered to the first pilot who took off from the Paris Aero Club, circled the Eiffel Tower, and returned to the club within thirty minutes.

Though the money meant little to Alberto—his father had left him with a fortune— it presented a challenge.

Postcard showing the 14-bis. Via Wikimedia

His first attempt failed when his 16-horsepower engine conked out, causing his dirigible to fall into a tree. On his second try, the airship crashed into a roof, and the brave Brazilian was left suspended in his basket fifty feet above the ground.

His third attempt was a success. “Did I make it?” he shouted as he passed the finish line. “Oui! Oui!” spectators roared back at him, throwing handkerchiefs into the air and whirling their hats on top of their walking sticks.

Flight was Alberto’s great passion. Arriving in Paris at 18, he had a balloon made— so tiny it could be packed into a travel bag, but big enough to carry his pint-size figure. Then came dirigibles —fourteen altogether.

In 1906, after the Wright brother’s historic flight, he built his own airplane. Named 14 bis, it looked like a bunch of boxes haphazardly thrown together. But it flew, making him the first man in Europe to fly a heavier-than-air machine.

Demoiselle over Paris. Via Wikimedia

His final aircraft was made of bamboo, aluminum, and silk. Seeing him buzz around in it, people shouted, “Our Santos is riding a dragonfly!” And that became its name: Demoiselle (dragonfly).

Santos-Dumont is a national hero in Brazil, where it is popularly held that he preceded the Wright brothers in demonstrating a practical airplane. Library of Congress.

Le Petit Santos— a remarkable little man indeed.

What is the smallest rodent in the world? What is the biggest? How long can rodents live? How do they find mates? In this wonderfully detailed new book from Roxie Munro, life-sized illustrations of rodent species from around the world accompany simple, thorough text describing their life cycles, sizes, habitats, and ranges. From ground hogs to guinea pigs and pygmy jerboas to capybaras, kids will learn all about the rascally rodents who share our world!
Roxie's Rodent Rascals has earned starred reviews from Publisher's Weekly, Kirkus, and School Library Journal.

MLA 8 Citation
Munro, Roxie. "Alberto Santos-Dumont." Nonfiction Minute, iNK Think Tank, 16 May
2018, www.nonfictionminute.org/the-nonfiction-minute/Alberto-Santos-Dumont.

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“Wrong-Way" Corrigan

5/13/2020

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Bo Zaunders
Wandering Journalist

“Where am I?”

The smiling young pilot was apparently nonplussed. He had landed at Dublin’s airport without a permit – or even a passport – and was now confronting several frowning custom officers.

“I took off from New York with the intention of flying to Los Angeles,” he explained. “After twenty-six hours coming down through the clouds I was puzzled to see water instead of land. I must have misread my compass and followed the wrong end of the needle.”
The Irish, never averse to a good yarn, looked at his primitive plane and cheered him for his audacity. When word of his remarkable flight reached the United States, the pilot, Douglas Corrigan, became known as “Wrong Way” Corrigan.

The story of Corrigan, an Irish-American mechanic, has been called an Irish fairy tale, an impish yarn spun with a straight face. It unfolded in 1938 but really began when Corrigan, at age twenty, worked on the team that built The Spirit of Saint Louis, the plane that took Charles Lindberg across the Atlantic. Lindberg became Corrigan’s hero. His dream: to make that same flight himself.

But Corrigan was just an ordinary guy struggling to make ends meet. Still, he managed to get a pilot’s license, and began flying in his spare time. In 1931 he bought his own plane. It was a battered old machine, but Corrigan loved it, and radically changed it, so that, one day, he would be able to duplicate his hero’s transatlantic flight. He was set to go – except for one major obstacle: more stringent regulations for trips overseas.

Applying for a government permit, he was turned down because his plane was too old. Then, in 1938, he got a license for flights between Los Angeles and New York. Seeing him him take off for Los Angeles, people wondered why he headed northeast instead of west.
The world laughed - an unlikely hero, a mirthful, courageous individual who thumbed his nose at authority.

Back in New York, Corrigan was treated to a ticker-tape parade on Broadway. A nationwide tour followed. He met with President Roosevelt, received membership in the Liar’s Club in Wisconsin, was hailed as “Chief Wrong Way” by a Native American tribe, showered with compasses, and given a watch that ran backward.

Asked about his flight, his response was always the same: a grin and “Man, I didn’t mean to do this at all.”

Corrigan arriving in Dublin, Ireland. Art by Roxie Munro

1938 headline about Corrigan in New York . NY Post

Bo Zaunders has written four nonfiction books for children and illustrated two. He is also a photographer specializing in food and travel. Like Corrigan, he loves adventures. You can find Feathers, Flaps & Flops in the iNK Books & Media Store.

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Harriet Quimby: America's First Lady of the Air

Alberto Santos-Dumont

“Wrong-Way" Corrigan

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