The Lost Pilots Page 8

  6

  FLYING SOLO

  The year 1929 was shaping up to be another remarkable one for aviation. The U.S. admiral Richard Byrd had become the first man to fly over the South Pole; closer to home, the American engineer Robert Goddard had tested the first rocket to carry scientific equipment. The U.S. Army Air Corps, employing aerial refueling, instigated a record-breaking six-day nonstop endurance flight over Southern California, while the famed Army Air Corps pilot Jimmy Doolittle achieved the first completely “blind”—that is, instrument-free—takeoff, flight, and landing. Across the ocean, the German airship Graf Zeppelin completed its extraordinary circumnavigation of the Northern Hemisphere. In a telling indication of the times, the aviation-themed film Wings even won the year’s Academy Award for Outstanding Picture. Not that the news was uniformly positive: 1929 also featured the greatest number of fatal civil aircraft crashes in United States history.

  There were brewing signs of economic instability, as well. On March 25, after the Federal Reserve warned of excessive speculation, the stock market experienced a mini-collapse, as worried investors began unloading their stocks and interest rates skyrocketed to 20 percent. Though the market quickly rebounded, its shaky foundation had been revealed, and steel production, construction, and automobile sales remained sluggish throughout the spring.

  With Kiki back in England, Lancaster was living at Manhattan’s Army and Navy Club, while Jessie, newly returned from Los Angeles, rented an apartment on West 56th Street. Though Kiki was across the Atlantic, Lancaster and Jessie were required, as always, to maintain the public facade that they were business partners only. This facade would remain the dominant factor in their relationship over the coming years; even among friends, they could not display any overt signs of physical affection, promulgating instead the continued fiction they were merely “pals.” (Whether or not their friends believed them is another matter.) Their notoriety as famous fliers—economic hardships notwithstanding—ensured that watchful eyes were always upon them, especially given the social swirl with which they were forever surrounded. As such, any concrete moments for physical, or even emotional, privacy remained frustratingly fleeting. Weeks or months could pass without the two of them enjoying any truly meaningful time on their own. And yet, despite these considerable obstacles, they remained firmly in love with each other, and steadfast in their belief that one day they would marry and enjoy a relationship free of any such stifling constraints. They had survived the extraordinary rigors of their record-setting journey; next to those, any setbacks seemed relatively minor.

  For now, however, it remained imperative that they establish separate careers as a sign of their independence. To that end, Jessie began studying for her pilot’s license at Red Bank Flying Instructors in New Jersey, where, to no one’s surprise, she made a characteristically sizeable impression. In the mornings, spectators would gather at the school’s airfield to watch Jessie fly; despite her fame, the sight of a woman aviatrix was still rare enough to cause a sensation. Jessie gleefully described the scenario to a friend in Melbourne: “I have been thoroughly enjoying life lately . . . I go out to the field every morning at 8:30 and say, ‘Hullo everybody, can I have my ship?’ They all grin and say, ‘Sure, Mrs. Miller, we’ll get her out’. . . . Then I cast an eye at the wind indicator, adjust my goggles and taxi for the take-off. It’s the life!” For entertainment she would race the famous Blue Comet train of the New Jersey Central Railroad as it sped by below on its way from Atlantic City. No matter how quickly she flew, the train always won in the home stretch. The Central Railroad’s management, aware of the public relations angle, soon began paying Jessie to ensure her continued participation.

  Lancaster’s future was looking brighter, as well. By March 1929, American Cirrus Engines Incorporated had produced its first engine, and Lancaster was handed his first major duty as demonstration pilot: participating in a light airplane flight contest that stretched from New York through the Caribbean to Mexico, and back. Amelia Earhart and George Putnam were among the judges. But while a gold medal win would certainly please the company, it wasn’t Lancaster’s primary mission; his duty was to prove the engine’s quality. On March 4 Lancaster and his competitors began their journey.

  Lancaster retraced the path to Miami that he had navigated back in January, before heading to Havana, Haiti, and Puerto Rico. At each stop along the way he hyped the engine’s capabilities. He crossed down through Martinique before arriving, in first place, in Barbados, and then flying on to Trinidad. There he spent five days displaying the Cirrus engine, before hopping back in the plane for the next leg of the journey, to Venezuela.

  But disaster struck as Lancaster lifted off from the landing strip: after hitting an air pocket, his Avian nose-dived back to earth, smashing headlong into the ground and shattering its front end. Lancaster was badly injured, putting an immediate halt to any momentum in his career. Instead, for three months he lay recuperating in a Trinidad hospital bed, where his wounds proved agonizingly slow to heal. For his subsequent return to the United States, Lancaster had to be stretchered on board the SS Vausan, which was steaming its way to New Jersey. After arriving in Hoboken, he was taken by ambulance to a hospital in Englewood, where he spent another several weeks recuperating. Only at the beginning of August was he finally discharged.

  Jessie was deeply distraught by Lancaster’s injuries, but she had little time to comfort him. American Cirrus Engines Incorporated had brusquely canceled Lancaster’s contract following his near-fatal crash, and Jessie had to scramble to bring in money for their partnership. Having breezed through her pilot’s course in New Jersey, Jessie was now only the third woman to earn a private license in New York, and one of only thirty-four licensed female pilots in America—a number all the more astonishing when compared to the country’s thousands of licensed male pilots at the time.

  For Jessie, opportunity in the wake of Lancaster’s crash in Trinidad arose in the form of the nation’s first Women’s Air Derby, jokingly but insultingly termed the “Powder-Puff Derby” by humorist Will Rogers. Founded by air-race impresario Cliff Henderson, who five years later would ban women pilots from participating in one of the world’s most prestigious competitions, the Women’s Air Derby was part of the 1929 National Air Races and Aeronautical Exposition. Its route would cover 2,700 miles, from Santa Monica, California, to Cleveland, Ohio. To participate, pilots were required to have a minimum of one hundred hours of solo flight; twenty-five of these hours must have been cross-country. While these same rules applied to the men competing in the national races, the Women’s Air Derby involved an additional, sexist requirement: the aircraft’s horsepower had to be “appropriate for a woman.” Pilot Opal Kunz, for example, owned a three-hundred-horsepower plane that judges viewed as “too fast for a woman to fly.” She was forced to race in a different plane.

  Jessie viewed the Derby as essential to raising her profile as a pilot, and in her direct, persistent way she persuaded the head of the Bell Aircraft Corporation, Lawrence Bell, to provide her with a lightweight Fleet biplane for the occasion. Because Jessie was so much smaller than most pilots, the Bell engineers had to essentially construct a new open cockpit around her.

  Jessie followed a relaxed schedule as she flew the Fleet biplane from New York to Los Angeles, focusing more on familiarizing herself with the plane than on speed. On August 18, 1929, she joined nineteen other contestants—including five other light aircraft pilots—in Santa Monica to begin the race. The lighter aircraft went first. The first major stop was Phoenix, Arizona, though only six contestants made it that night, with Jessie the only light airplane pilot among them. But their evening was soon interrupted by disastrous news: pilot Marvel Crosson had gone down in the Arizona desert, apparently after suffering carbon monoxide poisoning. Her broken body was discovered two hundred feet from her plane.

  Jessie roomed in Phoenix that night with Amelia Earhart, the sentimental favorite to win the Derby, whose celebrated Atlantic flight had oc
curred just ten months earlier. Now, though they were deeply distressed by Crosson’s death, Earhart and Jessie remained convinced that the Derby needed to continue. They spent hours that night venting about the public prejudice against women aviators, such as the double standard regarding pilot deaths: if a man died it was considered a natural part of flying’s inherent danger, whereas a woman’s death was considered improper and intolerable. Earhart’s natural reserve slowly wore off and she became warm and animated. By the end of the night the two women had formed a friendship that would last until Earhart’s disappearance in 1937.

  The next morning the other pilots voiced their agreement with Jessie and Earhart’s conclusion: the Derby had to continue. Crosson’s death only “made it all the more necessary that we keep flying,” Earhart later explained. “We all felt terrible, but we knew now that we had to finish.”

  Accidents continued to plague the contestants throughout the race: Ruth Nichols crashed but survived; Blanche Noyes’s plane caught fire in the air; Margaret Perry contracted typhoid fever; Pancho Barnes’s plane smashed into a car that drove unexpectedly onto the runway as she was attempting to land. The day after Phoenix, Jessie herself faced disaster when her biplane ran out of fuel and she had to make an improvised landing in the scorching desert sands outside of Douglas. (The problem lay with a faulty fuel gauge.) But the pilots pressed onward, their movements obsessively detailed by a clamoring press corps. When they arrived at the finish line in Cleveland, the pilots were greeted by a roaring crowd of eighteen thousand spectators. Jessie placed a respectable third in her class. Soon afterward she also became, along with Earhart and the others, one of the founding members of the Ninety-Nines, an organization dedicated to advancing women’s roles in aviation.

  So pleased was Lawrence Bell by Jessie’s performance, and by the front-page publicity she’d provided his company, that he registered her for another event in the National Air Races: the fifty-mile closed-circuit race for women, which Jessie proceeded to win. (Lady Heath took second place, although later in the meet she plowed her plane through a Cleveland factory roof and was gravely wounded.) In later events Jessie took two other medals, for second and third place. Her strong overall performance helped the female pilots vie successfully for the spotlight with such crowd favorites as Charles Lindbergh himself. For her very first outing as a solo pilot, Jessie could have hardly met with greater success. She was understandably ecstatic.

  Following her Derby performance, the Long Island–based Fairchild Aviation Corporation asked Jessie to pilot one of its aircraft in the 1929 Ford Reliability Tour, a 5,100-mile series of aerial contests featuring thirty-five male fliers and three female ones. Once again Jessie proved her strength and endurance in the cockpit over the contest’s rough miles, placing eighth overall. She was the only woman to complete the competition, the other two having withdrawn in the race’s initial stages. Jessie’s groundbreaking performance brought with it a rush of media acclaim, which Fairchild acknowledged with a thousand-dollar bonus. Oil and gas companies wanted in on the action, too. The floodgates had opened, and Jessie was momentarily drowning in money.

  The same could not be said of Lancaster. After being dumped by American Cirrus Engines following his life-threatening crash, he was struggling with both his physical recovery and his need to find another source of income. He was genuinely encouraging of Jessie’s success, crisscrossing the country to greet her at airports thousands of miles away, but he was also traditionally masculine, and his pride must have been wounded as Jessie’s ascendant fortunes matched his own declining status. But their partnership remained rock solid, and Lancaster, wounded pride or not, took remarkably unselfish pleasure in Jessie’s newfound success.

  7

  A CHANGE IN FORTUNE

  On October 29, 1929, Black Tuesday swept Wall Street like a typhoon, as investors traded an astonishing sixteen million shares on the New York Stock Exchange in a single day. Three million shares changed hands in the first thirty minutes alone, while deafening cries of “Sell! Sell! Sell!” engulfed the trading floor and rumors spread of investors jumping from buildings in despair. By midafternoon billions of dollars were lost and thousands of investors wiped out. The market continued to plummet over the ensuing weeks, finally reaching its nadir in mid-November. These events helped plunge America, and the rest of the Western industrialized world, into the Great Depression, at the time the worst economic downturn in the history of the world.

  Like everyone else, freelance pilots in America were battered by the financial collapse. The worlds of civil and sporting aviation, whose growth had seemed limitless just months before, constricted in on themselves, and even newly crowned stars like Jessie abruptly found themselves fighting for employment. The effects of the crash on her and Lancaster were swift: the Cunningham-Hall Aircraft Corporation finally canceled its long-delayed monoplane project, and Lancaster’s subsequent job, as a Victor Aircraft test pilot, was terminated after the company was forced into receivership.

  Jessie’s flight competition earnings were rapidly draining due to outstanding bills and day-to-day living expenses for two, and by early 1930 she and Lancaster were fretfully searching for a source of replenishment. Their situation was further complicated by the arrival in New York City of Jessie’s widowed mother, Ethelwyn, who moved into Jessie’s apartment on West 56th Street. Ethelwyn had never been a fan of Lancaster’s, and, with a mother’s intuition, she did her best to discourage his presence around Jessie. Adding to the difficulties, the cost of caring for and feeding her mother ate into Jessie’s already pinched savings.

  Finally, at a cocktail party in March, Lancaster and Jessie met a Dutchman named C. P. Stork who was seeking demonstration pilots who could double as salespeople for his growing Stork Corporation. He immediately offered them employment for the generous salary of six hundred dollars a month each, not including commissions. There was only one catch, Stork told them. “Have you both got commercial licenses?”

  Jessie was about to answer with a regretful “no” when Lancaster jumped in. “Yes, we’ve got those all right,” he assured Stork.

  “That’s good, because you must have them to fly prospective customers about and demonstrate aircraft,” Stork said. “When can you start?”

  “Monday,” Lancaster answered.

  Jessie knew this was a blatant lie, but she kept her mouth shut until they had left Stork’s office and were in the elevator.

  “We haven’t got commercial licenses,” she reprimanded Lancaster. “What are we going to do?”

  “Get them,” he replied, in his usual nonchalant manner. Didn’t Jessie remember their friend J. R. Booth from the Ottawa Flying Club, whom they’d met during the Ford Reliability Tour? Booth had assured them he could always be counted on for assistance. Now, Lancaster said, they had three days before their next meeting with Stork, and it just so happened that Canadian licenses were binding in America.

  The following morning Lancaster and Jessie stepped out on the Ottawa train platform into a cold so piercing and raw that it felt like a punch to the stomach. Luckily, Booth handed them two raccoon fur–lined jackets to offset the chill. The licensing exams had been arranged, he told them. “We’ll get everything organized this morning,” Booth announced, “and then I’ll take you to the Silver Slipper for lunch.”

  Lunch with Booth proved to be more liquid-based than food-based, and Jessie’s head was swimming when she went for her eye test that afternoon.

  “What’s the matter with you?” the doctor asked, as Jessie struggled to focus on the letters on the eye chart.

  She admitted, in her typically forthright manner, that she was fairly drunk.

  The doctor, unperturbed, proved accommodating. “We’ll do the rest of the examination first, then,” he reassured Jessie. “By the time you’ve finished that you’ll be sober.” Fortunately, his prediction was correct.

  Both Jessie and Lancaster passed their flying tests with ease. True to Booth’s word, they received their co
mmercial licenses late that afternoon. Jessie, inadvertently setting another record, proved to be the first woman to receive such a license in Canada. By midnight, she and Lancaster were back home in Manhattan.

  For the next six months the two aviators worked for Stork, but with the Depression in full swing, their total airplane sales numbered fewer than five. Still, hard times were everywhere, and their pathetic sales records didn’t harm their reputations as pilots. When aircraft manufacturer Edward Stinson insisted they undergo training on his Stinson Juniors before displaying the planes to the public, he was, like everyone, impressed with the results. “You fly as well as any man,” he wrote to Jessie, in the characteristically sexist manner that marked the times.

  By the time September rolled around, the Stork Corporation’s fortunes, like those of so many others in America, had drastically waned, and Lancaster and Jessie were forced to battle for contracts in an aviation landscape so barren that even the finest pilots—Lancaster and Jessie included—struggled to find freelance work. From a financial standpoint, their wisest move would have been to relocate to England, where their celebrity was such that their images were still prominently featured in advertisements for the country’s foremost aircraft manufacturers. But returning to England would have meant dealing with Kiki and the children, and Lancaster, never a man for deep reflection, preferred to stay in America, pursuing the familiar if dodgy world of one-off competitions and headline-seeking feats.

  Their Stork Corporation salaries had been healthy enough that Jessie and Lancaster had grown accustomed to a certain level of high living, with enough money left over to put into savings. But after an entire August without employment, and with no additional prospects in September, Lancaster had to face the increasing hopelessness of his situation. This, again, forced the onus of responsibility onto Jessie, who, as a female pilot, remained a rare breed and thus a more newsworthy figure. Her boldness and her taste for adventure may have offended mainstream sentiment, but they also ensured a continual audience for her exploits. She was as aware of this as Lancaster and, ever the dutiful partner, set about trying to line up another headline-grabbing flight.