Good morning, it's Friday, the day of the week when I pass along a quotation intended to be uplifting or enlightening. Today's lines are reprised from a teenaged female pilot (or "aviatrix," as female pilots were then known) named Elinor Smith. The press dubbed her the "Flying Flapper," but the daring feat she performed 94 years ago today stamped her for the history books.
I've written about her previously in this space and told the story about her and her female cohort in the 1920s and 1930s. But they are worthy subjects of adulation. For one thing, they remind us of how far we've come as a society, and how much 21st century citizens of this great country owe to previous generations of pioneers.
The era between the 20th century's two world wars is known as the Golden Age of Flight, a tip of the wings not just to the mechanics and engineers who kept improving aeronautical designs, but also the cadre of aviators who barnstormed, raced each other, and broke endurance and distance records all over the globe.
Many of these pilots were household names. A few still are. That's because aviation's early days were not for the faint of heart. Flying in the 1920s and 1930s meant climbing into contraptions made of wood and fabric, doing mid-air repairs, and scrambling out of compromised or burning airplanes -- sometimes when they were still moving. Instrumentation was rudimentary, weather reports spotty, and many of the flight paths were untested and unmapped.
The dangers and uncertainty can hardly be exaggerated. A grim illustration of this truism became apparent in the Dole trans-Pacific race organized as a publicity stunt by the Lincoln Oils Company. Eight aircraft crews that qualified for the race lined up at the starting line in Oakland, California, at noon on Aug. 16, 1927.
As more than 50,000 spectators looked on, two of the planes crashed on takeoff. Three others returned minutes later with mechanical issues. One of them, the Miss Doran, took off again, after the plane's spark plugs were replaced. On board were pilot Augie Pedlar and the plane's namesake, a schoolteacher named Mildred Doran. Neither she nor Pedlar were ever seen again. A second plane, Golden Eagle, also disappeared. As Richard A. Durose wrote in Air & Space Magazine, the U.S. Navy searched for 12 days and found nothing. In the end, 10 aviators died in that contest: three while preparing for the race, five during the race, and two in the search for survivors.
In one sense, Mildred Doran seems like a Roaring Twenties version of Christa McAuliffe, the New Hampshire schoolteacher who died aboard the space shuttle Challenger. Yet Doran is better understood as belonging to another tradition, the one in which bold and curious risk-takers -- female and male -- push the aeronautical "envelope," in Tom Wolfe's memorable phrase. Mildred Doran, you see, was a student pilot.
Last year, in a book titled "Fly Girls," author Keith O'Brien highlighted the stories of five other early female pilots who made aviation history. Of the five, two of them -- Amelia Earhart and Florence Klingensmith -- paid the ultimate price. So did Harriett Quimby (1912), the first woman to fly across the English Channel; Raymonde LaRoche (1919), the first woman to be given a pilot's license; Bessie Coleman (1926), the first African American aviatrix; and many more.
But the good, they don't always die young. Elinor Smith is an example. It was on this date in 1928 that she exploded into the headlines with a deliberately provocative feat of aerial bravado: She flew under New York City's four East River bridges.
Although the stunt began on a dare, it wasn't undertaken on a whim: She studied the weather, wind currents, tides, and bridge construction before taking off on a clear and nearly windless Sunday morning in her Waco 9 airplane.
Word of her impending flight had rippled throughout aviation circles and just before takeoff, a handsome young man stepped onto the wing-step and put a friendly hand on her shoulder. Elinor recognized the famous face instantly. "Good luck, kid," said Charles Lindbergh. "Keep your nose down in the turns."
She took this advice, flew under the four bridges to great acclaim, cheerfully accepted the ensuing (but brief) suspension of her pilot's license, and went on to perform myriad other aerial feats and break numerous flying records. She also lived to be 98, passing away peacefully in a California retirement home in 2010.
"I had been brought up to think that anyone could do anything he or she put his or her mind to, so I was shocked to learn that the world had stereotypes it didn't want tampered with," she wrote in the preface to her 1981 memoir. "In an age when girls were supposed to be seen and not heard, look beautiful, and occasionally faint, I didn't seem to fit in anywhere."
She fit in the sky just fine and, in her mid-50s, the U.S. Air Force put her in the cockpit of a T-33 jet trainer and a C-119. In her late 80s, NASA invited Elinor to pilot the space shuttle's vertical motion simulator at Moffett Field, not far from where Mildred Doran and those ill-fated pilots had taken off for Hawaii in 1927 -- the year before Elinor buzzed commuters crossing New York City's bridges.
"It's a spectacular ride," Elinor Smith said of the NASA simulator. "Everything about it is thrilling, but perhaps the most gratifying is that the entire support crew was made up of females. My instructor, the operator and the assistant were all women."
And that is our quote of the week.
Carl M. Cannon is the Washington bureau chief for RealClearPolitics. Reach him on Twitter @CarlCannon.