Read Online Before Amelia by Eileen F. Lebow - Free Book Online Page A

first, Marie was the lone woman pilot; the Stella ladies went as passengers with male pilots. In the second, Marie won the Premier Grand Prix, traveling from Nancy to Neufchâteau, in Belgium, reportedly in fifteen hours, to beat one of her teachers, Georges Blanchet, three time winner of the Aero Club of France Grand Prix.
    In 1912, Marie took part in the tenth running of the Paris–Sea of Ireland race, organized by the Aero Club of France. There were twenty–four participants, including Marie in her
Shooting Star,
with Quénardel de Warcy as passenger. It was an exhilarating experience; the wonder is that she was content to stop in Ireland.
    Even when she turned to flying an aeroplane, ballooning remained a pleasurable experience for Marie. The uncertainty of where she might end up, the search for the right air current to carry her in a desired direction, at a desired speed, suited her adventuresome soul.
    In 1908, Marie had visited the Voisin brother’s factory at Châlons and decided the new sport had potential. When Roger Sommer took her up for a ride in September 1909, she was elated—and hooked. By the following year, she had signed up for lessons with Hubert Latham at Mourmelon to learn to fly his Antoinette, an elongated, graceful monoplane considered, by some, difficult to fly. The pilot sat well back from the wings because the weight of the machine was distributed among its parts, unlike the Blériot aeroplane, whose weight was centered in the front. Marie was the only woman pupil at Latham’s school. Between early lessons, she made her historic balloon trip, and, on March 15, 1910, she was presented with the Médaille d’Or of the French Academy of Sports. Her activity was prodigious.
    Aviation was a world of its own in those years. The enthusiasm and excitement that flying generated in the first decade of the twentieth century—the fever to explore the heavens—was shared by a small band, bound by camaraderie and the constant possibility of death. Marie did not dwell on the subject, nor did the others, but part of the attraction of flying was knowing the risk and overcoming it. She wrote about flying frequently, describing it as “intoxicating,” stressing her belief that the true aviator’s soul found the struggle with the atmosphere “a rich compensation for the risks.” To fly like a bird was the ultimate romantic quest.
    Early in her aviation training, on a flight with Latham, Marie was initiated into the rolling and pitching that typically buffeted an aeroplane maneuvering through gusty air currents. On landing, Latham, who selidom showed emotion, remarked that he had never been so violently shaken. Another time, flying with Charles Wachter at thirty meters high, their aeroplane almost collided with a biplane. Marie thought disaster was imminent, but at a few meters’ distance, the biplane turned upside down, with no injury to the pilot, and Marie and Wachter flew on. Marie believed that the close calls she had with her teachers prepared her for whatever might come when flying alone. (Charles Wachter was less fortunate. He was killed when a wing collapsed while he was flying at Rheims in July 1910.)
    In her 1910 article “The Intoxication of Flight,” Marie described a close call that occurred on the morning of her license tests. As she began her second flight, a biplane flew off sixty meters from her. Instinctively, she left the course and rose to a height of eighty meters to avoid his wake and continued on her circle of the course without sighting the other machine. When she landed, Marie learned the two aeroplanes were within twenty meters of each other at one moment, but because of her machine’s wing structure she was unaware of this. A change in the aeroiplane’s wing design would soon do away with this “inconvenience.”
    A first solo flight is always memorable. September 4, 1910, was just this for Marie, who