IT'S YOUR LIFE, LIVE IT TO THE MAX!

I think there has always been a primal, human fascination with flying from Icarus and his wax wings to those fabulous Young Men in their Flying Machines. Flight symbolizes freedom, adventure and danger. Until the Wright brothers finally lifted off the ground, man's yearning to conquer the skies was intertwined with fantasy  myth, and adventures with manifested in many cultures and many forms including flying carpets, flying horses, 

Superman and even Snoopy in his aviator goggles. 

Don't you think there is romance, magic and heroism in the myth of the early aviators and a possibility for this in life itself. It is exciting stuff and actors chosen to play pilots are nearly always dashing heroes, the Errol Flynn types.
Let's face it - the pioneer aviators were sexy.

In the mid-Sixties my high school guidance counselor warned, "Look Bonnie if your sole ambition and talents are to become a pilot, then you'll grow up to be nothing." This was at a time when the nation was in the thick of ratifying the Equal Rights Amendment. Betty Friedan published the Feminine Mystique and Gloria Steinem introduced Ms Magazine. Women were breaking out of stereotypes yet a female guidance counselor was telling a young girl that she could not do what she wanted because she was a mere girl. Weren't we encouraged to find something we liked to do and then to pursue it with a sense of genuine purpose and happiness? There was a real momentum going here.

Had we learned nothing from those early female flyers?

Baroness Raymonde de Laroche

Being an excruciatingly shy teenager at the time I didn't have the nerve to tell my guidance counselor that even when it was considered rather bold for women to drive automobiles the self-proclaimed French Baroness Raymonde de Laroche - who had herself driven racing cars - learned to fly one of Gabriel and Charles Voisin's first aircraft ever built. It was a contraption resembling two cardboard boxes held together by blind faith. Granted the idea of flying two cardboard boxes had little appeal for me but airplane design had come a long way since the turn of the 20th Century.

I sometimes imagined I was the Baroness - well connected in French society and a famous stage performer combined with drop dead gorgeous looks. Being her I would have no trouble convincing someone that flying was for me. 

Imagination - perhaps that is how dreams actually do come to life.

I was impressed by the Baroness's bold approach to life truly living it to the max. After her first flight with Charles Voisin she proclaimed, "This is the way we humans are meant to travel." I bet onlookers and aviators were dazzled by her natural skill as a flyer and her incredible allure.

 In-other-words she was hot!

I think for the Baroness flying was the role of a lifetime and she went after her new found passion with a combination of guts and gusto. 

Remarkably this took place in 1910 - just two years after practical airplanes were in the air. 

Not to fill you with too many facts all at once, but also in 1910, across the Atlantic, a little pit bull of a gal - measuring 5'1" tall in boots and bonnet - named Blanche Stuart Scott popped onto the aviation scene. 

Totally taken with the thought of being airborne the feisty redhead had to do some heavy coaxing to get the famous aircraft designer Glenn Curtiss to teacher to fly. 
It was less than a seismic request since flyers were beginning to buzz around the powder blue skies in record numbers. But Curtiss apparently thought no one was as capable a pilot as he was especially - God forbid - a woman. He apparently told anyone in earshot Scott was to be his first and last female student. I suspected that Curtiss wasn't concerned in the least about Scott's safety but for his glossy reputation as an aircraft designer and builder and his precious flying machine that looked like an anorexic insect that sprayed heaps of hot castrol oil on its pilot's face and clothes.

Hanna Reitsch

Yet for all his chest beating Curtiss knew, and Scott knew, she was a natural. By her own admission Scott had a "yen for machinery."

A few decades later a starry eyed little girl with her head in the clouds, 19 year old German glider pilot Hanna Reitsch, standing a fraction over 5 feet tall and never pushing the scale passed 90 pounds, desire to fly began with an image of flying like, "The storks in their quiet and steady flight and the buzzards circling ever higher in the summer air." And soon Hanna would discover that flying was indeed, "Potent, yet gentle, like some seductive wine, the fever of flying descended on me coursing through me to my very fingertips."

I think 1930's German air racer Thea Rasche summed it up best when she said, "Flying was more thrilling than love for a man and far less dangerous."

You've got to love these gals!