The Lost Pilots Read online

For the airplane itself, Lancaster turned to the Lancashire-based company Avro, one of the world’s first and finest aircraft manufacturers. Avro was eager to be associated with a potentially record-setting journey, especially after Lancaster assured them that he intended to promote how dependable their plane was, not to be a daredevil. In September 1927 the company gave Lancaster a significant discount on their brand-new Avian III biplane, whose streamlined body resembled that of a silver wasp with wide, rounded-off wings that could fold up vertically. Lancaster and Jessie, in a tribute to Lancaster’s mother, named their plane the Red Rose, and those words, framing the image of a rose, were tidily painted in black on the aircraft’s front sides. The plane featured fresh overload tanks, modified center-section struts, and a narrower tubular-steel interframe, which meant reduced room for suitcases and spare tires. The plane’s small luggage compartment only had room for the bare essentials: emergency rations, maps, a few spare parts and tools, some oil, a gun and ammunition, and their clothes and toiletries.

  As it happened, only late in her preparations for the journey did Jessie consider what to bring. She faced the dual considerations of trying to minimize the plane’s weight while also making sure she had the necessary amenities. In the end, her gear for the trip fit into a small leather bag. She packed a comb and mirror, one change of underwear, one pair of socks, one pair of silk stockings, one clean shirt, one pair of shorts, one box of face powder, one pair of satin evening shoes, and one black sheer fabric evening gown. Her toiletries consisted simply of a toothbrush, a tube of toothpaste, and a small cake of soap. She wore low-heeled leather shoes and breeches, short trousers fastened just below the knee. With sexist condescension, the Manchester Guardian newspaper noted that this was “probably the smallest amount of luggage ever taken by a woman on a journey of this length.”

  A final issue remained: Who would insure the plane, and what would they charge? Lancaster’s lack of fame was a liability for insurers, and for the aviation world as a whole. Unlike Charles Lindbergh, Lancaster was an unproven entity. Professional aviators thought that bringing a female passenger represented pure gimmickry, which was enhanced by the news that Lancaster would be distributing pamphlets for his mother’s Christian charity. But for Lancaster and Jessie the flight was serious business indeed.

  On the chilly, wet morning of October 10, Lancaster drove to Woodford Aerodrome in Manchester to inspect his new aircraft. He made a short test flight in which the plane performed flawlessly. “London to Australia in Light Plane,” read the Manchester Guardian headline announcing Lancaster’s visit, describing him as “not only an adventurous airman but a well-known athlete,” the latter a reference to his RAF boxing match. Declaring full confidence in the Avian’s capabilities, Lancaster flew to Croydon Airport in South London later that afternoon. This would be the starting point for his and Jessie’s journey.

  On the flight to Australia, Lancaster, sitting in the rear cockpit, would be the lead pilot, but Jessie was eager to master the art of aviation as well. (The Red Rose’s front cockpit would feature a dual control panel so that Jessie could fly the plane herself.) To provide her with lessons, Lancaster brought in an old World War I pilot friend of his named T. Neville Stack, who had recently flown from England to India. Jessie was transfixed as soon as Stack took her up in the air. “I thought it was marvelous,” Jessie later said. “I simply adored it. I took to it absolutely. Never a qualm, never a moment of airsickness, nothing. Bill always said I was a natural pilot.”

  Lancaster planned to give her additional instruction, but when he showed up two hours late for her first lesson with him, he found Jessie already in the air, flying solo. For ten minutes she soared nimbly over his head. After making a smooth landing, she took off again before Lancaster had time to join her in the cockpit. She repeated this action several more times in order to make her point: she was born to be a pilot.

  Aviation was an intensely male-dominated field at the time, and for women who wanted to participate, the confidence and audacity that Jessie exhibited were essential. From the beginning, female aviators had faced an onslaught of taunts and criticisms that women were mentally and physically unfit for flying. Claude Grahame-White, one of England’s first star aviators, expressed the dominant prejudice, proclaiming, “Women lack qualities which make for safety in aviation. They are temperamentally unfitted for the sport.” Grahame-White believed, among other things, that a woman’s sense of balance was inferior to that of a man. Arnold Kruckman, the aviation editor for the New York American, opined that women were far too sensitive emotionally to handle the stress of flying, and that they lacked discipline, “the natural heritage of many men.” Orville and Wilbur Wright at first thought women shouldn’t fly, a belief they held in common with celebrated American aviator Glenn Curtiss. Prominent German pilot Hellmuth Hirth agreed; he also shared the anxiety of other male aviators that their public regard would drop considerably if women joined the field. If women could perform the same spectacular and daring aviation feats as men, Hirth and others fretted, then perhaps those feats were not so special.

  Another reason for the bias against female pilots was that flying was dangerous: early aviators were killed at an astonishing rate. While it was fine and well for a young man to risk his life in an airplane, for a young woman to do so was thought unnatural. As the New York Times sniffed, “It would be well to exclude women from a field of activity in which their presence is unnecessary from any point of view.”

  One way international aero clubs enacted this bigotry in aviation’s early years was by banning women from flying competitively against men. Women were restricted instead to their own contests at their own airfields. And yet these exhibitions attracted rapturous fans of both sexes, who thrilled at the sight of these talented and daring women in the air.

  For the pilots themselves, the risk was beside the point. “Most of us spread the perils of a lifetime over a number of years,” said the intrepid French baroness Raymonde de Laroche, the first woman to fly a heavier-than-air machine into the air alone, and the first woman in the world to receive an airplane pilot’s license. “Others may pack them into a matter of only a few hours. In any case, whatever is to happen will happen—it may well be that I shall tempt Fate once too often. Who knows? But it is in the air that I have dedicated myself, and I fly always without the slightest fear.” De Laroche herself was a case study in flying’s dangers: ten years after her revolutionary flight of 1909, she died in a plane crash at Le Crotoy airfield in France.

  On August 1, 1911, screenwriter Harriet Quimby became the first American woman to receive a pilot’s license. She was also the first woman to fly across the English Channel, though her achievement was little noted due to massive media coverage of the RMS Titanic’s sinking the day before. “I’m going in for everything in aviation that men have done,” Quimby declared, “altitude, speed, endurance, and the rest. . . . Flying is a fine, dignified sport for women, healthful and stimulating to the mind, and there is no reason to be afraid so long as one is careful.” On that last point, Quimby was unfortunately mistaken. In 1912, she fell victim to tragedy when her two-seat monoplane crashed over Boston Harbor, killing her and her male passenger.

  Quimby was followed in America by such daredevil pilots as Ruth Law and Katherine Stinson in 1912, women who became known as much for their death-defying stunts, like wingwalking, as for their flying skills. In those early years of aviation the field possessed, especially in America, an unabashedly circus-like atmosphere, and the hair-raising stunts performed by people like Blanche Stuart Scott and Jessie Woods only contributed to aviators’ superhuman reputation among spectators on the ground. The telescopic focus on aerial acrobatics in America, and the concomitant risks that fliers increasingly had to endure to stand out in the crowd, eventually drove many women out of the field. Their European counterparts, by contrast, had greater freedom to concentrate on pursuing extended cross-border and international flights.

  The most famous female aviator
of all, Amelia Earhart, began her flying lessons on January 3, 1921, in Long Beach, California. By October of the following year, Earhart had flown her own biplane fourteen thousand feet into the air, setting a new women’s record. In May 1923 she became only the sixteenth woman in the world to earn an international pilot’s license. As her reputation grew, Earhart wrote newspaper columns that advocated vigorously for female aviators, and she became vice president of the American Aeronautical Society’s Boston chapter. With her close-cropped hair, aviator helmet, and leather jacket, Earhart’s now-iconic look mirrored that of the era’s other female pilots—all of those intrepid fliers whom, for the general public, she would eventually come to represent.

  As Lancaster and Jessie prepared for their journey, Amelia Earhart was still months away from the seminal flight across the Atlantic that would turn her into an international celebrity. But as their scheduled day of departure drew near, Lancaster and Jessie’s momentum was briefly halted by superstition. They had intended to leave on October 13, but to fly without insurance on such a day felt overly risky. They decided to postpone their departure for twenty-four hours. If insurance for the plane hadn’t materialized in that time, they would begin their journey regardless. Otherwise the press would dismiss them as amateurs, and Lancaster and Jessie would continue depleting their already-shaky finances. What’s more, Kiki, who had traveled to London with the children to see Lancaster off, had to get back to her job. The Australian high commissioner to the UK and his family were also due at their departure, and Lancaster and Jessie felt determined to impress them. No matter the consequences, they had to leave Croydon Airport behind.

  On October 14, 1927, a group of journalists and supporters clustered around the Red Rose to witness the grand event. Lancaster and Jessie had twenty-five pounds sterling in their pockets. “Woman Flying to Australia” read the understated headline in the Manchester Guardian. The Sydney Times called Jessie a “heroic woman” who was “credited with being the driving force of the enterprise [who] has handled all the business details.”

  When the Australian high commissioner arrived, he handed them an official letter of support. “I am an Australian,” Jessie announced to the reporters, “and have always wanted to be the first woman to fly from London to Australia.” (The “always” was a significant exaggeration.) “The flight is not intended in any way to be a stunt,” she added reassuringly; “it is purely a utility flight to demonstrate the practicability of the light airplane as a means of covering long distances.”

  Lancaster also delivered a short speech, emphasizing yet again that his and Jessie’s purpose was to test the Avian III model, not to engage in attention-grabbing exploits. Kiki looked on proudly, bestowing goodbye kisses to both fliers. A bowl of scarlet petals was scattered over the plane, with each softly curling petal representing the Red Rose. Once Lancaster was settled in the rear cockpit and Jessie in the front, five-year-old Pat climbed into Kiki’s arms to scrawl a goodbye note on the plane’s lower right side. The time was 2:35 p.m., and the heavy fog that had covered the airport all morning had finally lifted enough to allow their departure. Raising his hand in farewell, Lancaster guided the plane down the unpaved runway. Achieving a nimble liftoff, the Red Rose angled up into the autumn afternoon.

  3

  SINGLE-MINDED ABANDON

  Even as they began their journey, Lancaster and Jessie knew relatively little about each other as people. During the months of hectic preparation for their flight, their interactions had, of necessity, centered on the myriad details that such an ambitious undertaking required. Though they enjoyed a friendly, effortless bond, and though their pulses quickened at the thought of their impending shared adventure, they had divulged relatively little of their personal lives. Not that that was an issue of concern for them: they were interested in action, not reflection; in experience, not rumination. They both lived in the moment, and the fact that they delighted in each other’s company was appreciated but unremarked upon. Nor did either acknowledge the undeniable fact that, even as friends, they appeared far more suited to each other than to their respective spouses.

  Their journey had been plotted to follow a dotted path of RAF airfields stretching from London to Australia. These stations were where most of their landings would occur, and where the two aviators would lodge. Lancaster and Jessie had been advised that, due to weather conditions, they should spend the first night of their journey in the quaint French town of Abbeville instead of flying on to Paris. And indeed, the fog remained so thick as the Red Rose flew over the English Channel that it obscured the water below.

  Lancaster and Jessie arrived at Abbeville at nightfall, but there were no lights on at the airfield to guide them, and so they landed instead in a small field outside of town. A group of French farmers approached the plane and gave Lancaster directions for the short hop to the airport. Because there was so little room to taxi the plane, he was forced to lighten the load: Jessie, her luggage in tow, would have to walk the two miles to the airport. Two of the farmers accompanied her, while Lancaster flew on ahead. As she carried her luggage from the field into the town, Jessie was struck by how unreal her new circumstances felt. In a matter of hours, it seemed, her life had become something wholly new. “My mind,” she wrote in the first of a series of dispatches for an Australian newspaper, “was a confusion of hopes, inhibitions, and great desires.”

  The next morning she and Lancaster headed for Paris. Shortly after flying over Beauvais’s massive (and still unfinished) thirteenth-century Gothic cathedral, they spotted a large French airliner, with passengers milling about it, stranded in a field below. Concerned, they circled the Red Rose back around, but the passengers waved that everything was safe: it had been a forced landing, not an accident. When they reached Le Bourget Airport in Paris, they were met by pilots from Imperial Airways, a British commercial air transport company, who provided lively conversation and humor as Lancaster and Jessie spent the afternoon tinkering with the plane’s engine and refueling its gas tanks. The weather conditions, however, remained dismal. Jessie felt, she wrote, as if “all the fogs in the world were dogging” them. Despite the gloom, the group later went out on the town for a mouth-watering dinner with wine. Joyously tipsy, Lancaster and Jessie took off their shoes and splashed laughingly in the fountains outside the Folies Bergère cabaret. To be young and free in one of the world’s great cities, surrounded by pilots who accepted her instantly, without comment, as one of their own—Jessie felt a warm sense of belonging that night that she would hold close in her memory over the months to come.

  Not until Lancaster and Jessie were flying toward the port city of Marseille one day later did the sky finally brighten and sunlight break through the clouds. But stiff crosswinds continued to batter the plane as they flew over the Rhône Valley, marveling from their cockpits at the quaint castles and churches nestled on the hillsides below. At one point the Red Rose ripped into an air pocket and plunged precipitously. Jessie, who wasn’t buckled in, launched straight up from her seat and cracked her head on the center wing section; dazed, she slammed back down with a jarring thwack. It was a painful and early reminder to always wear her seat belt. When the drained aviators finally reached Marseille, the gleaming Mediterranean abutting the city provided them with their first glimpse of blue water on the trip, a positive omen after the soggy weather of the previous days.

  After stabling the Red Rose at the airport, where they met up with another group of aviators, Lancaster and Jessie took the train into the city, taking notice of its bustling, boat-lined quays. Famished after their long day flying, they ate at a cheap, cramped restaurant; chickens strode brazenly beneath the tables as Lancaster, Jessie, and their companions feasted on thick hunks of bread and cheese, sardines and onions, and cheap vinegar-like wine. As in Paris, Jessie felt an immediate bond with these pilots, who bade no notice of her gender and treated her instead with the respect due a fellow flier. This was a pattern that would continue throughout the journey; the people who o
bsessed over her status as one of the world’s few female aviators were journalists and civilians, not other pilots. Aviators were still a rare enough breed that they felt bound by a comradeship that superseded any markers of personal identity.

  Lancaster spent these early days of the journey studying which flight patterns and which on-the-ground servicing the Red Rose best responded to. He shared his mechanical knowledge with Jessie, who was anxious to learn. Soon she was checking clearances, cleaning spark plugs, re-oiling engine parts, and straining fuel, which required standing on the plane’s fuselage and pouring gasoline through chamois leather into the tanks. This latter task was risky: frequently wind would blow the gasoline back over her, burning her skin. Jessie would often pilot the plane herself while Lancaster rested, although he still insisted on performing all takeoffs and landings. The plane had no radio, so the two communicated via a small hatch between the cockpits. Lancaster would tap Jessie’s head to gain her attention, then pass her a handwritten message through the hatch.

  As they headed toward Italy, continued foggy weather added to the strain of their journey. Lancaster had to fly uncomfortably low to the sea just to make out the water; even the plane’s nose was invisible in the murky haze. Mountains rose straight up from the water’s edge, further boxing them in. The skies had cleared just enough by the time they reached Pisa that Lancaster and Jessie were able to marvel from the air at the famed Leaning Tower, which they circled twice. Rain continued to pour on and off during Lancaster and Jessie’s flight to Rome, but the view turned dramatic as the city appeared in the distance. The numerous bridges spanning the Tiber “seemed like so many clips cutting a silver ribbon into sections,” Jessie breathlessly noted, “and not even the Caesars dreamed of such an approach as ours to the city of Seven Hills.”

  A day later Lancaster and Jessie flew close enough to Mount Vesuvius to witness smoke curling from its crater “as if from an evil pot.” Touching down at Catania, a port city on Sicily’s eastern coast, they were greeted by General Italo Balbo, one of the principal architects of the Italian Fascists’ rise to power, who with gracious formality presented them with a personal note from Mussolini extolling his best wishes for a successful journey. Zealous Italian Air Force pilots, clothed in immaculately tailored dark gray uniforms, scurried around the Red Rose, scrawling “Viva Mussolini” all over its fuselage. Lancaster and Jessie couldn’t help but grin at the energetic scene.