Feminist pilot Harriet Quimby secretly learned to fly on Long Island before breaking barriers around the world
GARDEN CITY, N.Y. -- Move over, Amelia Earhart.
The first lady of the skies was the invincible and virtually unknown Harriet Quimby.
Her influential life from Long Island to Europe was one of adventure, courage and defiance, and it is told in a new book.
CBS2's Jennifer McLogan recently met up with author and former CBS journalist Don Dahler at the Cradle of Aviation Museum, the backdrop for his new book.
Feminist pilot Quimby secretly learned to fly on the Hempstead plains of Garden City and later died in a dramatic and shocking airshow more than a century ago.
"This is so tragic that this woman isn't mentioned in the same breath as Amelia Earhart," Dahler told McLogan.
Dahler writes Quimby, born into poverty in Michigan, became a distinguished dramatist and foreign correspondent, then a short-lived international celebrity as the first woman in the United States to receive a pilot's license and the first woman to fly solo across the English Channel.
"It was only a few years after the Wright Brothers had first flown," he said. "The year before Harriet took lessons, 100 pilots perished."
Male pilots, that is. Men owned all the flight schools and denied women as too weak.
Then, Quimby met the Moisant family.
"Moisant said, 'I will teach you how to fly. We're going to open a flight school on Long Island,'" said Dahler. "In reality, what people like Harriet were flying back then was a skeletal frame of wood with canvas wings and a lawn chair out in the open."
Journalists were tipped off that a fashionable woman dressed in purple was the pilot in Garden City.
"She takes her hood off, pulls the cord and it flows into a gown and she introduces herself. And the next day, The New York Times had an article about the first woman learning how to fly," Dahler said.
Quimby also piloted out of the Nassau Boulevard flying field. The 350-acre site closed in 1912, the year of her tragic death, but the train station remains.
She had secretly trained for her daring feat of crossing the English Channel, hoping to surprise the world. She left the Cliffs of Dover, survived an engine stall, and landed on a beach in France. She was toasted all night.
"She went back to Paris, went to bed thinking, 'This is wonderful, I've changed the world.' Woke up the next morning, opened the newspapers, and she was not mentioned. And the headlines of the papers was the Titanic sank, 1,500 people dead," said Dahler.
Quimby returned to America and wrote about her adventure. She was soon asked to fly in a Boston airshow.
It was a two-seater. The passenger's weight shifted during turbulence, and Quimby was thrown from the sky.
"She fell to her death. Her death was instant," Dahler said. "It was only two months after her crossing of the English Channel and she was gone."
Her memory to history slowly faded, but her 37 years provided inspiration to Earhart, Sally Ride, and the women who followed to help change history.