Women Aviators (6 page)

One day, Neta and her family went to the county fair. Neta's eyes grew large as she took in a sight she had never seen before: giant balloons in the air. Neta spent her time at the fair watching balloons and the balloonists who flew them. What would it be like to fly? she wondered.

When she was in her teens, Neta's family moved to Ames, Iowa. After completing high school, she continued her education at Iowa State College (later renamed Iowa State University). The agricultural college had added home economics for the new female students being admitted. Neta was required to complete 17 hours of home economics courses before she could study what she really wanted to learn about: combustion engines, mechanical drawing, and machine repair. Until then, she spent much time in the university library reading up on subjects that fascinated her.

While at college, Neta heard about the Curtiss Flying School in Newport News, Virginia. The school had been started by Glenn Curtiss, an aviator and aircraft manufacturer. Neta applied during her second year of college, but the school turned her down. The response was, “No females allowed.”

The next year, a newspaper ad caught her attention. The Davenport Aviation School promised to teach anyone to fly for $400. This time, her application was accepted. She may have been the first woman to attend the school, but she was soon
accepted as one of the guys, particularly after she pointed out errors in the blueprints of the plane they were building. Her classmates called their redheaded peer “Curly.”

The school introduced the students to aviation, but it was a low-budget operation in an abandoned warehouse on the river. The students had to build and maintain the airplanes if they wanted to fly. This requirement suited Neta's mechanical interests just fine, and she took her first flight on July 21, 1917. She climbed to 6,000 feet (1,800 meters). Years later, Neta would still remember racing down the field at the start of that first flight and the moment the tail lifted off the ground.

Initially, Neta's mother was embarrassed about Neta's being in flight school. It just wasn't something women did. Her mother didn't tell the rest of the family, but soon the secret was out. Neta's grandfather, a Civil War veteran, was so excited that his granddaughter was learning to fly that he visited her at school and took his first and only ride in an airplane at the age of 74. After getting her license, Neta would later take her now-proud mother for a ride around Ames.

Unfortunately, a few months after opening, the school shut down after one of the planes crashed, killing the president of the school and injuring the instructor. With only 100 minutes of flying time under her belt, Neta didn't have enough flight time to test for her license. Several of her classmates who were headed to Curtiss Flying School promised to put in a good word for her.

The 21-year-old Neta spent a few weeks at home, unsure of what to do next. At the end of September, she received a letter. With shaking hands, she opened the envelope and read it. She had to read it again to make sure she was reading correctly. The Curtiss Flying School had accepted her. Within the week, she rejoined her classmates.

The school was a good one, and Neta learned a lot. She logged flight time while eagerly awaiting her first solo flight. But before she could take that flight, the US government stopped all flying at the Virginia school. World War I had started, and security officials worried that German spies might enroll in the school as a way to spy on nearby military bases and government.

The airplanes were dismantled, and they and the students were shipped to Miami to continue training. This didn't last long either. About two months later, president Woodrow Wilson issued an order that there would be no private flying in the United States during the war. Neta still hadn't taken her solo flight. With a letter of recommendation from the school, she returned home, a frustrated “almost pilot.”

Her frustration didn't last long. One of Neta's classmates recommended her for a job with the British Air Ministry. As an expediter, her job was to oversee the delivery of airplane parts built in the United States for Great Britain's Royal Air Force. She tested and inspected engines and engine parts in Curtiss training planes until the end of the war.

Before leaving her job, she bought a damaged Canuck, a Canadian training plane that was similar to the US Jenny. She shipped it home and put it in her parents' backyard. Airplanes were still rare in Iowa, and a plane in a backyard received extra attention. People kept stopping by to see what this young woman wanted with a wrecked airplane.

The truth was that she was rebuilding it, and she planned to fly it. The backyard had its uses, but there was no way she could take off from 828 Wilson Avenue in Ames, Iowa. After rebuilding the plane to her satisfaction, she began dismantling it so that she could move it to a pasture next to the Iowa State College campus. After reassembling the Canuck, she made her first solo flight.

The US government was still recovering from World War I and didn't have the manpower to focus on the relatively new aviation industry. Neta and others like her received licenses for training and pleasure flights but weren't supposed to take passengers with them. Neta erased the
n
in “none” on her license to leave “one” as the number of passengers she could take. Because her Canuck was a biplane, only two people fit anyway—she and a passenger.

Neta began making money by barnstorming in the Midwest and charging people $15 for each 15-minute ride. She later inked a contract in the town where she was born to give two flights daily for three days. She received $1,000 for the six flights.

But Neta Snook didn't feel like a real pilot until she received her international license from the FAI. As soon as she had that little blue book with her photo and license number, she decided it was time for a change. Iowa winters limited her flying, so she moved to where she could fly year-round: California.

After arriving, she got a job running a commercial airfield— Kinner Field in Los Angeles—and became the first woman to operate a commercial aviation business. She did a little of everything: took passengers for rides, tested new airplanes, towed aerial advertisements, and gave flight instructions.

In early 1921, a woman about Neta's age wearing a well-cut brown suit approached her. With a scarf around her neck and
her gloves in her hands, the confident woman reminded Neta of the “cultured young ladies” back home in a private girls school. The woman introduced herself as Amelia Earhart, and she had a question for Neta: “Will you teach me to fly?”

Neta received 75 cents per minute for teaching Amelia Earhart to fly the Canuck she had built. Six months later, Amelia bought a Kinner Airster, a plane that Neta had tested for designer Bert Kinner. By now, the two women were also friends, and Neta stopped charging for lessons. Neta was concerned about Amelia flying the Kinner, a lighter plane that was harder to control. But Amelia was determined. On her first and only lesson with the Kinner, Amelia crashed it. Neither woman was hurt, but it took time to repair the airplane.

Neta married her boyfriend, William Southern, in 1921, and she wanted a baby. Early airplanes were dangerous, and many people died in the early days of aviation. Neta felt like she had to make a choice between flying and being a mother. Being a mother won. She traded her Canuck and lessons to fly it in August 1922 for a house and lot in Manhattan Beach and a $500 Liberty Bond. After the lessons, she never flew again. She didn't even ride in an airplane for 55 more years. But she did have a son, William Curtiss Southern, named after his father and aviator Glenn Curtiss.

Many years passed before Neta began lecturing and writing about her life as an early American aviator. Everyone wanted to meet the woman who taught Amelia Earhart to fly.

W
omen like Bessie Coleman and Harriet Quimby may have demonstrated that women were capable of flying, but the barriers to flying refused to fall. Flying was not considered a ladylike activity. Many women had trouble finding people to give them lessons; others had trouble getting their pilot's licenses. Persistence was the key, and during the late 1920s it was beginning to pay off as more and more women took to the air.

Flying was expensive—both the lessons and the cost of airplanes—so it's no coincidence that many women pilots came from families with money. In 1928, a pilot's license cost $500. This was at a time when the average person's yearly income was $800.

Other women, such as Bobbi Trout, earned their way from the beginning. Still, flying was too expensive to be a hobby for most people. Some paid for aviation through exhibition flying or barnstorming. Some companies sponsored women who participated in races or set records. The companies' logos were featured on these pilots' planes.

Flying started as entertainment. At first, spectators were thrilled just to see people in the air. But as the number of pilots
increased, air races became the way to draw crowds. Air races were the sports event of the day, attracting crowds of up to 150,000.

Then, on August 18, 1929, Charles Lindbergh crossed the Atlantic. For the next several years, records were being set and broken quickly as pilots of both sexes pushed the limits of aviation.

A strong string of firsts by women pilots took place in the 1920s and 1930s. Anne Morrow Lindbergh, the first US woman glider pilot, received the National Geographic Society's Hubbard Medal in 1934. She was the first female recipient, receiving the recognition for 40,000 miles (64,000 kilometers) of exploratory flying over five continents with her husband, famed aviator Charles Lindbergh.

Around the time Lindbergh went up, approximately 9,215 pilots were licensed, yet less than 1 percent of them were women. Many of those women pilots performed at exhibitions and set records. They weren't allowed to enter competitions, such as the National Air Race, because men decided those races were too dangerous for women. Amelia Earhart and other female pilots began talking about holding an air race for women only.