Before Amelia (15 page)

The stress and deprivation of the past years took their toll. Melli was never strong after the suffering of the war years, and her life, so involved with flying, was now hardly worth living. She resided in a rooming house in the city, enveloped by depression much of the time. If she had any hope of flying, she had to renew her license, which was seized when the war began, an undertaking now more of a threat than a challenge for her tired spirit.

At the end of a flight on a gray October day in 1925, she shattered the aeroplane, a wartime Fokker, on landing, by either accident or design. It was the period to her flying career.

Two months later, on December 22, 1925, the gloom of her life ever deeper, Melli went to her bedroom and shot herself with a revolver. It was an unusual act for a woman, but then Melli had been unconventional all of her life. Without a dream, her life ceased to have meaning.

In 1986 a plaque was raised at her birthplace near Dresden to commemorate the one hundredth anniversary of her birth. It was a small tribute from a nation that failed to appreciate her achievements while she was alive. An exhibition in 1992 at the Heimatmuseum Treptow, Berlin, brought Melli a measure of the recognition she deserved.

In a period that witnessed the stirring of feminism, Melli had no interest in the movement nor in political parties. Totally involved in flying and building aeroplanes, her life was one eloquent statement of the capabilities of women and their ability to compete with men on equal terms. Many men admired her; many others disliked her for forcing her way into a man's world and winning a place there with success.

Other women were flying in Germany in the years when Melli was at Johannisthal. Bozena Làglerovà, a Czech, and the first woman student of Hans Grade, was the second woman to receive a pilot's license in Germany, No. 125, issued October 19, 1911. Earlier, on October 10, she was issued Austrian license No. 37, the first woman pilot recognized by the Austrian Aero Club.

Bozena began her training in the spring of 1911. A crash in July that demolished the aeroplane seemed at first to have injured her only slightly. When internal injuries were discovered, she went home to Prague to recuperate. Toward the end of that period of rest, she started flying again and won her Austrian license. This success encouraged her to return to Germany to finish her training contract with Grade, resulting in her winning a German license.

With her new professional rank, she returned to her homeland. On October 22, while flying fifteen hundred meters high at Kladno–Krocehlavy, near Prague, she crashed. Fortunately, she had only slight injuries, and the aeroplane was later repaired. In the next two years she flew extensively in Europe, making appearances at Leipzig, Hamburg, Johannisthal, and Friedrichshafen.

The second German woman to earn a pilot's license, the third issued to a woman, was Charlotte Möhring, from Pankow near Berlin, who studied with Grade at Gelsenkirchen. Flying a Grade monoplane, she won license No. 285, issued on September 7, 1912, despite an earlier landing smash. She was shaken up but without serious injury, and the machine's right wing was soon rebuilt. Early in 1913, she was manager and teacher at a small flying school at Mainz–Gonsenheim, founded by Curt von Stoephasius. Stoephasius occasionally delivered aeroplanes to new owners.

On one such trip to deliver a Rumpler Taube from Johannisthal to Döberitz, Charlotte was listed as passenger. She described the trip later for a journal—her total delight with views from a thousand meters, then twenty–three hundred meters, and “Mother Earth” spread out below. The one hundred–horsepower Mercedes motor made the forty–five kilometer trip to Döberitz in eighteen minutes, ending in a long, slow glide downward from twenty–three hundred meters in marvelous turns and eights with the wires humming. For Charlotte, the sound offered complete contentment.

About this time, Charlotte met Georg Mürau, also a Grade student, from Bork, who had started a small flying school at Gelsenkirchen. The two married and in 1914 were running a flying school in Crefeld with Charlotte acting as manager and teacher. She and her husband made flights and exhibited in twenty–one German cities, as well as foreign countries, in an aviation career that lasted until the First World War began. Writing in 1953, Charlotte never lost her enthusiasm and interest for the “beautiful flying sport.” Apparently, she did not resume her career after the war.

Martha Behrbohm, the third German woman pilot, earned license No. 427, issued on June 4, 1913, after first studying at Johannisthal under Paul Schwandt, an early student of Grade, then with Hans Grade himself at Bork. Like Melli, she was the daughter of an artist, who was an enthusiastic supporter of aviation. Through flying, Martha met Hanns Georgi, who obtained his training at Leipzig–Lindenthal from Oswald Kahnt, another Grade student, before going to Bork for his license tests. Their mutual interest led to marriage, and the two were known as “the flying couple” in exhibitions. Actually, Germany had three flying couples at this time: Beese–Boutard, Möhring–Mürau, and Behrbohm–Georgi all of whom operated flying schools.

Early one Sunday morning, Martha and Hanns set off from the Bork flying field on a short flight to Johannisthal to take part in the Round Berlin Flight. Aviation was still such a primitive science that what should have been a short flight took most of the day. Shortly after takeoff, the Grade
eindecker
(“one–wing,” or “monoplane”) became lost in early morning fog. Martha had a self–made map of basting pins fastened to one leg of her trousers to indicate the direction of flight, but in the encircling gloom, it was useless. The aeroplane made an emergency landing, hoping to orient the pilot, and in doing so broke one axle of the under chassis and half of the propeller. A telegraph was sent to Bork for the necessary repair equipment, and the two fliers settled down to wait.

An hour later a car from the Grade factory arrived with Mr. Grade himself and two mechanics, who promptly went to work to install the replacement parts. Martha and Hanns waited at a nearby restaurant, to the delight of the owner, who was thrilled with the visitors, who had literally dropped from the heavens. On the ground, curious country people appeared as if by magic and watched every move of the mechanics. It was their first introduction to the technical advances in the world beyond their farms.

Hours later, the repairs were finished, but the propeller was now smaller by six centimeters and too weak to carry the weight of two passengers. Martha got out, and Hanns continued alone to Johannisthal, a six–minute flight after all day spent on the ground.

Years later, remembering the flight, Martha enjoyed telling people about the “kindergarten” days of German aviation, when pilots were at the mercy of wind, rain, and fickle weather, when pilots made emergency landings using their legs as brakes and passengers held on for dear life to the brace rails of the chassis. In those days fliers could not imagine the enormous development in aviation, and the speed of it, that would occur after 1913.

Behrbohm–Georgi bought two Grade monoplanes and opened a flying school in August 1913 at the new flying field at Leipzig–Mockau.
They had great plans and much confidence, but their timing was poor. There were many flying schools, and, coupled with the public's general disinterest in aviation technology, their plans did not succeed. The public wanted stunt flying; tumbling in the sky was what attracted spectators. The couple exhibited and the school limped along until the war ended civilian activity.

It is worth mentioning that Hans Grade, an important personality in German aviation, trained more women pilots than all the other German flying schools together. In this regard he was a man out of the German mold; Grade's view was why shouldn't women fly? An officer student of that period recalled that women students were subjected to severe verbal ridicule—double–entendre references to women's anatomy were popular—that he likened to running a gauntlet. The only defense was to ignore the shouted comments and laughter.

The last woman pilot licensed in Germany before World War I was Else Haugk, who earned license No. 785 on June 6, 1914. (Her name is sometimes mistakenly written as “Haugh.”) Else was Swiss but went to Germany because there was more aviation opportunity there. She received her training in Hamburg at the Hansa Flying Works under Karl Caspar's direction. Like Melli, she learned to fly on a Rumpler Taube named Hansa Taube by Caspar, which was actually a copy of the successful monoplane from Johannisthal. Weeks after Else passed her tests, the coming military conflict ended all civilian flying.

During World War I there was no civilian aviation, and for several years after the war Germans were forbidden to fly. Judging from Melli's case and the silence of her compatriots, when aviation revived, the first women fliers were left behind by the tremendous advances in technology in the intervening years. A new generation of women would have to pick up where the pioneers left off.

Two other women deserve mention, Lilly Steinschneider and Rosina Ferrario. Lilly, Hungar ian by birth and a student of Karl Illner, won license No. 4 from the Hungarian Aero Club early in 1912. Notably, she competed with men in 1913 in competition at Vienna, one of two women—Jeanne Pallier from France was the other. The women won a creditable third and fourth place in a duration contest. Lilly was flying an Etrich Taube with an Austrian Daimler sixty–five–horsepower engine, Pallier an Astra biplane with a Renault eighty–horsepower engine. Both women were scheduled to compete for altitude a day later. Unfortunately, Lilly crashed in a cornfield in an emergency landing when her motor stopped, ending her competition. According to an account in the
ArbeiterZeitung,
Lilly, who emerged unscathed, was glad to be rid of the machine; it was old. One writer commented that Lilly, an accomplished horsewoman, drove her aeroplane like a Lipizzan—the performance was precise, regal.

Rosina, born in Milan on July 28, 1888, received license No. 203 on January 3, 1913, from the Italian Aero Club. Flying a monoplane, she debuted at Como in the Circuit of the Lakes, and from there she appeared at Naples, Rome, and the better meets in Italy. She was the only Italian woman to win wings before the war.

FAR TO THE EAST, a succession of exhibitions by French and German fliers brought aviation to the attention of the Russian public. Raymonde de Laroche showed Russian women that flying was not just for men. The following year, Lydia Zvereva, the first Russian woman to earn a pilot's license, received certificate No. 31, on August 22, 1911, at the Russian Aviation Association Flying School at Gatchina, flying a Farman.

Born into a military family in St. Petersburg in 1890, and educated at the Czar Nicholas I Institute for Girls, she proved herself equally as capable in an aeroplane as on the ground with a wrench. Once, when there was a problem with the motor of the school Farman before a flight, her instructor told her to wait while he fetched a mechanic. She waited, but when no one came, she took a look at the motor, discovered what was wrong, and repaired it. When her instructor returned with the mechanic in tow, the motor started and ran perfectly.

All was not uneventful, however. As in Germany, Lydia discovered some men were not thrilled by her presence: The Aero Club demanded such a high security deposit for a contest at Tsarskoe Selo that she had to bow out; at Gatchina airfield, a competitor put iron filings in the motor of her Farman. Lydia was amazed: “I do not know who could get such an outrageous idea; could I really be competing with somebody?” Of course, and, obviously, she was a threat. A fellow student said of her flying: “Zvereva carried out flights in a bold, decisive manner. I remember everybody was paying attention to her masterful piloting, including the high-altitude flights.”

Such episodes and the rigor of exhibitions in places as diverse as Baku, Tiflis, and Latvia—for a while she teamed with E. Spitzberg, sportsman and pilot—led her to consider other aviation work. Marriage to her flight instructor, Vladimir V. Slyusarenko, a sports flier and teacher, led, with the help of Fjodor Gerogievich Kalep, well known in the world of motors, to Lydia and her husband's establishing an aeroplane manufacturing plant. Originally, a repair and flying school in Riga, the operation expanded, building ten Farmans under government contract by the summer of 1914, before moving to St. Petersburg, where Farmans and Moranes were manufactured. Lydia helped in the factories at Riga and St. Petersburg; she flew infrequently, mainly to try new models.

In May of 1914 it was announced in Riga that Lydia would perform a flight on the 19th in a Morane monoplane. The hippodrome was standing room only, with more crowds along the fence. At the appointed time, 8
P.M.
, Lydia climbed into the monoplane, checked the motor, and took off, climbing for several minutes to some eight hundred meters. At that point she switched off the motor and pointed the Morane into a dive. As the seconds ticked off and the crowd tensed, the motor roared again, and the machine turned upward and completed a loop. Leveling off, Lydia proceeded to spiral downward to the field. No more than ten minutes, the astonished spectators could hardly believe what they had witnessed: the first woman pilot to loop an aeroplane. Male aviators, Peter Nesteroff and Aldophe Pégoud, had performed this feat before her, and other women would follow her in the next two years, but Lydia did it first.

When war came in 1914, Zvereva and Slyusarenko concentrated their construction at St. Petersburg, where output in 1916 totaled about eighty Farmans and Moranes, both French models—the work of some four hundred workers and “eight office employees and specialists, an enviable proportion even today.”

Unfortunately, Lydia caught typhoid fever in April 1916 and died on May 1 at the age of twenty-six. She was buried in Alexander Nevski Monastery while an aerial formation flew over the cemetery in her honor.

Lydia was unusually outspoken about wanting to win equality with men in the air: “Thus, by opening the path to aviation for Russian women, I am inviting them to follow me to score a victory in the air by women, in this respect to have equality with men.” The majority of the women pioneers may have felt this same sense of purpose, but, more conscious of social attitudes, they didn't state it so boldly.