Before Amelia (26 page)

In short order, four of Moisant's aviators quit; Quimby left, after appearing at Guadalajara and León, for New York, where she hired a new manager, A. Leo Stevens, well known as an aeronaut and an air-show organizer. Her abrupt departure avoided an unpleasant experience. Matilde, Houpert, and the mechanics were stranded for almost two weeks on a train trying to leave Mexico. Harriet missed that ordeal, although it would have made fine copy for
Leslie's.

Harriet later wrote in
Leslie's
that she had the idea of flying across the English Channel while in Mexico but kept it secret, lest someone else would have a similar inspiration. Once back in New York, she started planning and wrote to the Blériot Company to inquire about the purchase of a new aeroplane. She knew what she wanted: a seventy horsepower motor and a machine similar to the one she had been using in America. Armed with a letter of introduction to Louis Blériot, she sailed for London on the Hamberg-American liner
Amerika
on March 7, 1912. In the city of Big Ben, she described her project to the editor of the
London Mirror,
who, delighted with the idea, offered her “a handsome inducement” to fly as a representative of the
Mirror.
The next step was to get a monoplane.

Crossing to Paris, she met M. Blériot and placed an order with him; she also arranged for the loan of a fifty-horsepower machine like the one she used in the United States. Leaving Paris, she traveled to Hardelot, where Blériot had a hangar and she could test the machine without attracting attention. Harriet imagined staying at a fine hotel at the sea-side resort, but discovered on arrival that the resort was closed until summer. Fortunately, she found a small room simply furnished in a café and was grateful for that.

The next several days saw wind blowing at gale force, some forty miles per hour. All hope of trying the loaned aeroplane faded as the wind continued. Harriet had promised the editor of the
Mirror
to be in Dover promptly, which meant quick action. She arranged for the machine to be shipped secretly to the aerodrome on the heights at Dover and wired the editor to have photographers and reporters meet her at the Hotel Lord Warden, binding everyone to silence. From the smooth area of the heights, the Dover Castle, straight ahead on the cliff, pointed the way across the Channel. Harriet took it as a good omen.

The following day, a Sunday, was clear, bright, and promised a warm sun. Harriet's group encouraged her to seize the moment and fly—at least try the new machine—but she stuck to her no-Sunday-flights rule. Unfortunately, the next day was windy and cold, totally unfriendly flying weather. Pilot and her supporters hung around all day, getting cold and miserable, hoping for a change. It was not to be.

In the meantime, Gustav Hamel, the English aviator who had flown the Channel a few weeks earlier, had joined Harriet's group. In fact, he had tested the machine on Sunday and found it working satisfactorily. Tuesday morning, April 16, the group was on the field at 4
A.M.
; there was no wind—scarcely a breath of air. Quickly, the monoplane was rolled out, Hamel took it up for a brief test, and declared it fine; then it was Harriet's turn.

Butterflies churned inside, but she appeared calm as she climbed into the machine. She had never flown a Blériot before, never used a compass before, never flown over water before. Instinct told her to get away quickly, for there were clouds and masses of fog in the distance; the wind would likely come up within the hour. Although she had layered warm clothes under her flying suit and wore a long woolen coat, a raincoat, and a sealskin stole over her shoulders, her solicitous friends handed her a hot-water bottle, which Hamel tied around her waist.

At 5:30 she was off the ground, rising in a wide turn to fifteen hundred feet from where she picked up the cast le in the distance, partly shrouded in fog. She headed straight for the flagstaff, as she had promised the
Mirror
and motion-picture men she would do, and in the next instant she was over the cliffs headed for France. The newspaper reporters on the tug below watched as she sailed overhead and disappeared into a bank of fog; now nothing was visible, not the water, not Calais. There was moisture everywhere, so much so that Harriet pushed her blurred goggles up on her forehead to peer ahead. She knew she was flying at a mile a minute, the distance to Calais was twenty-two miles, and it was time to drop lower in hopes of spotting land.

A confident Harriet Quimby, America's first licensed woman pilot, prepares to take off as Gustav Hamel gives a last-minute assist.
INTERNATIONAL WOMEN'S AIR AND SPACE MUSEUM, INC.

Lowering from about two thousand feet to half that, a ray of sun struck her face; straight ahead was the sandy shore of France. Happiness struggled with uncertainty. Where was Calais? Being unfamiliar with the coastline, she decided to drop to about five hundred feet and travel along the coast to try to get her bearings. A rising wind with puffy gusts sent her inland, where she looked for a landing place, but the tilled fields neatly arranged below her discouraged her from coming down and tearing up a field. Turning back toward the coast, she decided on the beach; it was hard and empty. Jumping down from her machine in the middle of nowhere, she was soon surrounded by curious farmers and towns-people, who had heard the aeroplane overhead and came running on the double. They carried her in triumph to Hardelot, a short distance from the beach.

Newspapers the next day should have hailed her achievement. Instead, the sinking of the
Titanic
stole the headlines. Coverage on the first woman to pilot an aeroplane across the Channel was relegated to the back pages of the world's newspapers, a disappointing show after such a unique feat. On Harriet's arrival in New York City, a huge suffrage demonstration kept reporters away from their usual beat. There were none of the welcoming stories she had expected. Harriet was featured in a number of journals, including her own weekly, which published her written account of the adventure. Among her observations: The hotwater bottle that had been tied to her waist for added warmth “was cold as ice” when she landed. While Hamel's warning—that a five-mile deviation in direction could result in being lost over the North Sea— was enough to intimidate the average person, Harriet wrote: “My heart was not in my mouth. I felt impatient to realize this project on which I was determined, despite the protests of my best friends.” She had supreme confidence and high expectations.

One story repeated frequently about the flight was Hamel's offer to fly the Channel for Harriet dressed in disguise. The reason given was his concern for her safety; Harriet's account in
Leslie's
is silent on this, but Elizabeth Hiatt Gregory quotes Harriet telling the story—Harriet thought it amusing—in a
Good Housekeeping
article. In
Leslie's,
she had only kind comments to make about him for his preflight assistance, but writing in
World Magazine
after her return, she expressed her disappointment that Hamel had taken Eleanor Trehawke Davies as a passenger across the Channel, thus depriving her of being “first woman to fly the Channel.” In this report, Harriet had confided her plans to an unnamed English pilot, whom she “trusted very much,” who, two days later, flew with a woman passenger across the Channel. Apparently, Harriet still smarted because of Hamel's betrayal.

One biographer, Henry Holden, claims that the
London Mirror
canceled its financial backing when Davies made headlines as the first woman to fly the Channel. Maybe, but the
Mirror
correspondents were on a tug off Dover tracking the flight and a second group waited at Calais for Harriet's arrival, then hurried almost thirty miles to join the landing party on the beach with a bottle of champagne. They insisted on saluting the happy pilot seated in the machine. Said Harriet: “Of course I did so—anything to oblige these faithful recorders of the events of the day.” They not only wrote and photographed, they carried her long seal coat across on the tug the day before, which seems unlikely if the newspaper had withdrawn support. The coat allowed her to make the trip into Paris looking fairly presentable, always a concern for her. Known for her dramatic style, Harriet had learned early that clothes can make the man, or the woman.

The new Blériot machine was a delight to Harriet. She commented to one reporter that she should name the machine
Catt
because a monoplane could be amazingly feminine when it wanted. Some considered the new model, a two-seater, unstable because it was sensitive to shifts in the center of gravity, but Harriet successfully carried a number of passengers for short trips. When flying without a passenger, she kept a heavy bag of sand in the rear seat. With its seventy-horsepower motor, it was a speedy machine, and Harriet loved speed.

Her achievement in Europe had made an impression in America; she enjoyed celebrity status, wrote knowingly on aviation subjects, and was invited to a number of meets. Estimating that her training had cost $2.50 a minute, she accepted those invitations that would help repay that expense and the cost of the new white Blériot.

She accepted an invitation to fly at the 1912 Harvard-Boston Aviation Meet at Squantum Airfield, which featured aviation greats: Lincoln Beachey, Charlie Hamilton, Farnum T. Fish, Earle L. Ovington, Paul Peck, Blanche Scott, and Harriet. As part of the meet's program, she would fly an experimental mail delivery from Squantum Airfield to New York City on July 7 to mark the close of the meet.

Monday, July 1, was a clear, sunny day. The crowds got their money's worth with bomb-dropping contests, aerial gyrations, precision landing, and good, plain flying. There was talk of Harriet's competing with Grahame-White in a speed race. She took passengers up for a brief spin and, dressed in her distinctive plum costume, posed repeatedly for the photographers. Shortly before 6
P.M.
, William A. P. Willard, manager of the meet, climbed into the Blériot for a short flight over Dorchester Bay to the Boston Light and back. He and his son, Harry, had flipped coins for the ride, with the father winning. Friends waved the two off as A. Leo Stevens, concerned about Willard's weight and the machine's sensitive balance, warned Willard to “sit tight,” not to lean or move once they were airborne.

The aeroplane rose quickly to several thousand feet, continuing upward to about five thousand feet as it reached the Boston Light in the late afternoon sunlight. Circling the light, the aeroplane turned back toward the airfield, passed at full speed over the field at about three thousand feet, turned wide in a circle to lose altitude, then started the approach glide over the tidal flats at one thousand feet. Harriet habitually made a sharp downward turn to land, and, this time, when the machine turned down sharply, its white wings heading into the west, Willard fell out. The machine seemed to steady for an instant before plunging again, then Harriet's plum-colored body fell from the machine as it turned over in its downward descent before five thousand horrified spectators. Once the machine lost its weight, it righted itself and descended at a thirty-degree angle until its wheels touched the water; then the aeroplane flipped over on its back. Its damage: a few broken struts and wires.

There was no agreement on the cause of the accident or even the details of what happened. The opinions were as varied as the aviators present. Glenn Martin observed there would have been no accident if the two had worn seat belts. (The following year the loop-the-loop feat of test pilot Adolphe Pégoud would make belts essential equipment.) Earle Ovington believed a loose control wire got tangled, but the machine's flight after Harriet and Willard were thrown out seemed to negate that. Ovington believed there was a construction error—the warping lever on the machine was not the conventional Blériot cloche seen on other machines, and the control wires should have been positioned away from the warping lever, or contained some way, to prevent their becoming entangled. Paul Peck said Harriet was coming down with the power wide open, and when she threw the tail up to volplane, Willard was not expecting it and was thrown out. Since the machine came down at a perfect gliding angle, it reinforced his belief that nothing was wrong with the controls.

A. Leo Stevens, Harriet's manager, had a different opinion. He believed that Willard leaned forward, probably to congratulate Harriet on the flight, and the sudden shift in weight caused the tail, which was already higher than the nose, to flip upward, throwing Willard out of the machine as if shot out of a cannon. From his association with Harriet, Stevens believed she struggled to control the aeroplane in the instant it seemed to steady before the second downward plunge. Weight was essential for control of the Blériot, which normally flew with an elevated tail, the nose slightly down because of the forward engine weight; any change in weight distribution upset the center of balance, causing the machine to plunge. When Willard was thrown out, Stevens believed the pilot “was pitted against a circumstance over which no aviator, no human ingenuity, or knowledge, or skill or practice could have control.”