Harriet Quimby

Harriet Quimby was one of the early thrill pilots—and one of the first to“buy the farm.” The Manhattan secretary and former drama critic with beauty-queen looks was the first woman to earn an American pilot’s certificate, and she hoped to win world fame with it. She figured that she could quickly make a name for herself if she was the first woman to fly across the English Channel. In April 1912, she did just that, departing from Dover and landing safely on the Normandy coast. But unfortunately for her, the historic flight was pushed out of the headlines for a slightly bigger story: The “unsinkable’Tifarac had gone to the bottom of the icy North Atlantic the previous night.

Undeterred, Quimby sailed back to the United States with plans to make real headlines. She entered the Boston-Harvard air meet, where she intended to set a speed record. Just before her attempt, she took her Bleriot two-seater up for a warm-up flight, carrying a passenger along for the ride. When she had flown out over Boston Harbor, spectators on the ground saw the plane make a sudden dip and saw the passenger fall from the plane and plunge hundreds of feet into the water. Harriet managed to recover control, but a few moments later, the plane again dipped, this time tossing Harriet to her death.

Plane Talk

Boston and other areas in the Northeast were a center of flying enthusiasm in the early days of aviation, probably because the Hub was home to some of the brightest engineering minds in the country. Over the years, however, better weather elsewhere, particularly in the South and Southwest, spread flying fever throughout the nation.

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Lincoln Beachey

Lincoln Beachey was another daring young pilot who didn’t survive to be a daring old one. Beachey was the first, and perhaps greatest, pilot of the “flying circuses,” as people called the barnstorming shows that traveled across the country. Beachey helped define the daring art form by creating some of its best-loved stunts. He was the first to loop an airplane by flying in a vertical circle. He was the first to fly upside down. He even flew “under” Niagara Falls by plunging down over the brink of the

American River and into the mist before reappearing near the water’s surface below. And Beachey created his signature “dip of death”—a stunt that was eventually to be the death of him.

In 1915, while performing an air circus act in his hometown of San Francisco, something went wrong during the “dip of death,” in which Beachey rocketed toward the ground at terrifying speed, then pulled up at the last moment. The stunt was a heartstopper, and it was known to make spectators faint in fear.

During his last stunt, though, his speed, which usually approached a then-blistering 90 m. p.h., got out of control at 103 m. p.h. Before he neared the ground where he could level off, the wings of his airplane crumpled, and he crashed.