Before Amelia (16 page)

The second Russian woman to win a pilot's license was Eudocie V. Anatra, who, on October 3, 1911, won certificate No. 54 at Gatchina airfield. Together with the flier Naumov she opened a flying school in 1912. One of their best-known students was Eugenie Shakhovskaya, who began her training with them before going to Germany. Little is known about the rest of Anatra's career. She did not make headlines, as some of her contemporaries did.

Eugenie Shakhovskaya, a titled princess, born in St. Petersburg in 1889, reportedly a cousin of the czar, began training at Gatchina, the third Russian woman to take to the air, following Raymonde de Laroche's lead. Flying was now acceptable for women, and more exciting than driving an automobile.

Eugenie, whose aristocratic birth freed her from worry about respectability, flew with Vladimir Lebedev in Russia, where she started her training before following Wssewolod Abramovitch, chief pilot of the Wright Company, to Germany. Abramovitch, with Karl Hackstetter as navigator, had made a long-distance flight slowed by technical difficulties from Berlin to St. Petersburg, arriving on August 6, 1912, twenty-four days after takeoff. The two had traveled sixteen hundred kilometers; the actual flying time was nineteen and a half hours. Ten days after his arrival in St. Petersburg, Abramovitch returned to Germany, possibly with Eugenie. An eager student on the Wright aeroplane after beginning lessons on a Farman, she would win her license within days.

On August 16, 1912, Eugenie received German license No. 274 having successfully passed her tests at Johannisthal airfield near Berlin. When war broke out in September between Italy and Turkey, she reportedly offered her services to the Italian government but was turned down. We do know she returned to St. Petersburg as a licensed pilot to demonstrate the Wright biplane to the military. At this time the Russians relied largely on foreign-designed aeroplanes, particularly Wrights and Farmans; Russian models were slow to appear, though factories turned out foreign models on a lease arrangement.

The press reported that Shakhovskaya made flights for the young women at a girls' high school in addition to flights for the military. Eugenie quickly gained a reputation for fearless flying; a strong wind did not faze her from going up with a passenger. On one such flight, the gas tank burst and the motor stopped, but Eugenie had the presence of mind to glide down, and landed safely. Shortly after this incident, she returned to Johannisthal.

The Fürstin, as she was known in Germany, spent much of her time with her countryman, Abramovitch, who was also known as a daring stunt flier and an excellent teacher. Apparently, Eugenie was content to fly and to teach students on the Wright biplane; competition did not interest her. Eugenie was greatly loved by Abramovitch, a feeling she reciprocated—the two fliers were a familiar sight, flying together frequently.

Early one April morning in 1913, the two went for a ride in a Wright biplane, possibly a new model, with Eugenie as pilot. As the aeroplane gained altitude, it suddenly lost power—vibrating like a stricken animal—side slipped, and, despite the pilot's efforts, dropped heavily to the ground. (
Flugsport
reported the Wright was caught in the backwash of a Taube flying ahead, but there is no mention of this from any other source.) The crash shattered the aeroplane. Abramovitch, with a concussion and internal injuries, died the following day; Eugenie suffered a broken nose and chest and lung injuries, but she survived.

Russian pilots Eugenie Shakhovskaya and Wssewolod Abramovitch seated in a Wright biplane. In April 1913, Abramovitch died in a crash when the plane that Shakhovskaya was piloting lost power and plummeted to the ground. Shakhovskaya survived her injuries.
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It was an unfortunate day. Fifteen minutes later, the Russian aviator Elia Dunetz died at Johannisthal when he glided down from a great height in a Schneider monoplane. Pressure folded the wings back, the machine plummeted to the ground—the motor still running—and the pilot was crushed beneath the aeroplane. The scene was all too familiar when pilots pushed fragile machines too far.

Little is known of Eugenie in the years after, other than her grief over Abramovitch's death, but rumors swirled around her. According to one sourced (probably apocryphal), she gave up flying, married a German officer in 1918, left him, and ended her years in a poorhouse in the south of France in the 1930s.

Other historians place her flying in Russia for the forces of Nicholas II as an ensign assigned to the First Field Air Squadron performing artillery spotting and reconnaissance. She did not fly combat missions, but some historians describe her as “the world's first woman combat pilot.”

According to these sources, there is much speculation about her activities while on military duty: She was involved in “numerous liaisons” with officers in her unit; she squandered her wealth on pleasures and shared her bed with “countless officers.” Charged with giving information to the enemy and attempting to flee to enemy lines, she was convicted of treason and sentenced to die by firing squad. Nicholas II commuted her sentence to life imprisonment in a convent— she was pregnant—from which the Russian Revolution freed her.

When next we hear of her, she had joined the Red forces and, reportedly, was chief executioner in Kiev for General Tcheka, dispatching captive officers with her Mauser pistol. The same sources claim she had become a drug addict (morphine was the standard treatment for pain) and, while drugged, shot an assistant for no reason. In return, Eugenie was killed by her fellow revolutionaries. No dates are given for any of this information, which reads like a romance novel.

There is no question that Eugenie could fly an aeroplane and she flew at Johannisthal; the rest needs more confirmation. We do know that she and her fellow countrywoman, Lyubov Golanchikova, were strong personalities, unconventional, thrived on adventure, and, like other women, took to the air for the sheer joy of it. Possibly Russian history has painted Eugenie more vividly than she actually was. If so, future historians may discover the truth about her life after Abramovitch.

Lyubov Golanchikova, another intriguing Russian—who was also a former dancer-singer known as Molly Moret with a small-time vaudeville company—was the object of wild enthusiasm after breaking Melli Beese's altitude record at Johannisthal in 1912. The third woman after Zvereva and Anatra to win a license in Russia (Eugenie won hers in Germany in August 1912), she received license No. 56, issued December 29, 1911, flying a Farman biplane at Gatchina. Like Eugenie, she had watched Raymonde de Laroche fly in April 1910, and her budding interest increased after a flight with Michel Efimoff, who won his license at Châlons, during the 1911 summer meets. She was hooked.

In the fall of 1911, Luba, as she was known in later years, took instruction in the early morning and performed on the stage at night, determined to get a license regardless of the effort. One source says her lessons were paid for by an admirer who found the idea of Luba flying intoxicating. Certainly for Luba, flying was passionately exciting. She described herself and fellow fliers as “aerial wanderers; eternity took us under its wing as a free child of ether.” (“Ether” was often used back in those days as a synonym for air.)

Luba soon discovered that despite a license in hand, the expected door of opportunity was closed. She signed up with an exhibition company to make appearances, but it was not the career she had imagined. In April 1912, while flying at a meet in Riga, Luba crashed on landing when bystanders threw sticks at her machine. She lost control of the Farman, hit a fence, and was hospitalized with minor injuries. It was a rude baptism to exhibiting in the countryside.

Michael Gregor described the hazardous conditions in exhibition flying at that time. Barnstorming around Russia, he planned a flight at Rovno in Russian Poland. The first site was far too open; spectators didn't have to pay to see the action. A second site, a racetrack in the middle of thick woods, was ideal, except for the trees and capricious wind conditions. On his first attempt to ascend, he failed to clear the trees. On the second, he blew a tire. Each time, repairs delayed the show until the excited crowd became impatient and started calling “fake.” Nervous police canceled the exhibition without consulting Gregor, and when the aviator tried to leave, the angry crowd followed him to heckle. Finally, when he drew his revolver and threatened to shoot, the crowd gradually melted away. Gregor said most pilots carried guns, claiming they were for protection in the air against birds flying into the propeller. Luba didn't have that assurance.

When Anthony Herman Fokker came to St. Petersburg in May 1912 to demonstrate his aeroplane to the military, he met Luba. Advised by his friend C. MacKenzie Kennedy to hire a woman pilot to demonstrate his aeroplane, he persuaded Luba to join his company in Germany and fly Fokker machines. That she was glamorous as well as a capable pilot was a bonus. The switch from biplane to monoplane was easily done, Luba was billed as the “Flying Girl,” and her warm camera presence helped make Fokker's advertising campaign a success. They saw much of each other at this time.

On November 21, 1912, flying a Fokker eindecker with a one-hundred—horsepower Argus motor, Luba established a women's world record for altitude, with a flight of twenty-two hundred meters, and became an overnight sensation. The newspapers hailed her flight, pointing out it was almost three times greater than Melli Beese's record the previous year. Actually, any comparison between the two records is useless. The machines were too different, as was the weight carried, but both records were remarkable for their time. One result of the flight was the military took a second look at Fokker's aeroplanes, which became stalwarts of German aviation in the First World War.

When in July 1913 the French aviator Léon Letort flew nonstop from Paris to Berlin in a Morane monoplane, Luba was among the welcomers. On the return trip to Paris, Luba left with him, leaving some Germans to wonder, was it love of adventure, or espionage? (Germany already exhibited signs of paranoia regarding the French.) If there had been a romantic relationship with Fokker, it had cooled. He admitted years later, after a failed marriage, that he spent too much time thinking about aeroplanes.

When Letort met Luba, he learned there was a ten thousand–mark prize still unclaimed for the first flight from Berlin to Paris, by a pilot of either nationality, to be made in one day. Flying time could begin one hour before sunrise and end one hour after sunset. The prize attracted Letort, and on July 23, he and Luba departed in his Morane at 4:30 in the morning. Weather soon dampened any hope of winning the prize, as heavy storms grounded them. Four days later the dispirited pair landed in Paris, where the enthusiasm of the French did much to allay their disappointment.

Russia's Lyubov Golanchikova in the Fokker monoplane that she used to achieve the women's altitude record in November 1912. However, in the early days of flight, records were short-lived because of rapid advancement in aviation technology
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HEIMATMUSEUM TREPTOW, BERLIN

Letort died in a crash near Bordeaux a few months later, when his machine overturned and he was crushed by the motor. According to the Russian writer Boris Tageev, Luba remained in France for some time, flying Nieuport and Morane monoplanes, before returning to Russia, where she signed a year's contract to test aeroplanes for Fedor F. Terechenko. Terechenko had set up an aeroplane factory on his estate south of Kiev, in the Ukraine, and was producing aeroplanes of his own design before the war.

Sometime before the Russian Revolution, Luba married Boris Philipoff, known as the “bread king of Russia,” who may have financed her lessons. When the revolution began in 1917, Luba was reported flying for the Red Air Fleet and training much-needed pilots. Historian Christine White writes that she flew several missions for the revolutionary forces during the civil war. Details are scanty.

We do know that Luba and her husband settled in New York City in 1923, using Philipps, an Americanized version of their name. In June 1927, Luba was in the news, trying for an altitude record over New York City. The aeroplane, a trimotor Fokker capable of carrying ten passengers, was the same model that Commander Richard E. Byrd planned to use for a transatlantic-flight attempt. The Fokker took off from Roosevelt Field on Long Island with Lieutenant W. L. Stultz at the controls, who then handed them to Luba. The flight, with seven newspapermen as unofficial observers, lasted about an hour. When Lieutenant Stultz landed the aeroplane, the altimeter registered eleven thousand feet, which Luba claimed as an altitude record for women.