A Twist of Fate
© 1998, by A. P. Glesner

Harriet, unable to sleep, stood in the darkness next to her machine. Again, she ran her hands along the fabric-covered wings and over the smooth wooden propeller. She strummed the aircraft's taut wire guys and sounded its fuel tank--full. For the dozenth time she climbed into the open cockpit and tested rudder and stick. Her aircraft was ready and so was Harriet, ready for a trial by air and water. Her chances for survival were less than half, and she knew it. Success offered fame, failure, a watery grave.

It was an exceptional night, a night to remember. The Channel stretched out before her, as smooth as polished marble. Overhead the clear, cloudless sky dazzled with countless pinpoints of light. Even stars normally too dim to be seen sparkled brilliantly. There was not even a hint of a breeze. Yes, Harriet thought--perfect. Tomorrow she would fly. Hopefully fly into history, duplicating Louis Blériot's celebrated feat three years earlier, perhaps even surpassing his time. Yes, tomorrow would be a time for records, a time in which she hoped to become the first woman to fly across the English Channel.

Aviation was not Harriet Quimby first venture into what was then viewed as men's domains. Michigan born, California reared, Harriet had already gained fame as one of America's first woman journalists, widely respected as a serious investigative reporter. It was in this capacity, eight years after her byline first appeared, that Harriet took an assignment that changed her life: covering the first international air show held in the United States, at New York's Belmont Park. There the airborne theatrics so thrilled her that she decided to take up flying herself. After being repeatedly turned down by other men, French aviator Andre Houpert reluctantly accepted her as a student. After three months with Houpert, during which she disguised her gender, Harriet presented herself to another skeptical group of men, the members of the Aero Club of America, who felt that women did not belong in the air. Harriet soon convinced then otherwise, as she had Houpert. Her skill as a pilot so amazed the Aero Club members that they awarded her the first aviation licence ever granted an American woman. During one landing she had even set a record for monoplanes, when she came within eight feet of the mark.

Harriet continued her career as a journalist; however, she now primarily became an aviation reporter. Increasingly, though, she spent her time in the air, thrilling crowds at air shows throughout North America. At these she became almost as well-know for her beauty (As the "Dresden China Aviatrix") and flamboyant, custom tailored, purple flying suit as she was for her airborne theatrics. At one such air show, at the Staten Island Fair, in September 1911, she became the first person to take off from and land on an airfield at night.

Although she was by then a respected and established member of the American aviation community, Harriet longed to make her fame world-wide. Thus, in December 1911, while preforming with the Moisant flying team at Mexico City, Harriet conceived a plan to become the first woman to fly across the English Channel.

Four months later Harriet waited for sunrise at Dover, England. She had chosen a proven aircraft for her endeavor, the Blériot XI, a two-seater monoplane nearly identical to the one that had first spanned the Channel. Like the prototype, it was constructed of steel tubing, bamboo and ash, covered with rubberized fabric. Its laminated walnut propeller, length of 26' 3" and wingspan of 25' 7" were also identical to the original; however, its three cylinder, air cooled, semi-radial Anzani engine produced twice the horsepower of the original. At 56 MPH, it was capable of cruising 9 MPH faster than Blériot had on his crossing.

Blériot had attributed much of his success to luck. Harriet would have to also rely upon luck--and more. For she had never before flown this aircraft, with its unconventional wing-warp lateral control and its array of French labeled instruments, including one she had never before used, a compass. Nevertheless, she did not hesitate. As the sun rose over the white cliffs, the ground crew pulled away the calks, and Harriet screamed, "Contact." . . .

Harriet's dream became reality. On a clear, mid-April morning in 1912, she winged over the Channel, besting Blériot's record by ten minutes. But her's was not the flight into history for which she had hoped. Instead she flew into obscurity. For while Harriet pre-flight checked her machine, on 14 April 1912, another modern wonder endeavored to break a record. Under that same, brilliant, star studded sky, two thousand miles away, a floating palace steamed in a quest of a record trans-Atlantic crossing. The Titanic was racing along at twenty-two and a half knots when the iceberg loomed out of the darkness and sliced into her hull. In the days that followed the newspapers that should have celebrated Harriet's achievement were instead filled with details of the disaster that carried fifteen hundred souls to an icy death.

A year-and-a-half later the sea also claimed Quimby. While attempting to set an over water speed record at the Harvard Aviation Meet at Squantum, Massachusetts, her aircraft suddenly pitched, catapulting Harriet and a passenger from their seats, plummeting them one thousand feet into Dorchester Bay.

On the day Harriet died, neither she nor any other American woman had the right to vote in a federal election. Harriet had not picketed with suffragettes, but in her own way she had championed their cause, had carried their banners high into the skies over America. As a journalist and aviator she had demonstrated that women were as capable and as worthy as men. Fittingly, her last article, "Aviation as a Feminine Sport," posthumously published in Good Housekeeping the month after her death, encouraged other women to push the envelope, and to secure their place as equal citizens of the world--and the sky.

Fly Back