“My earliest memory was at dinner with Dad using a knife to show us how the controls of a plane worked,” Elinor Smith told The New York Daily Mirror in 1942. At 16 she got her flying license; at 18 she set records for altitude and endurance by a female pilot; at 23 she became the first woman to have her picture on a Wheaties box; and recently at the old age of 98 she died, reports the Times. Known as the “Flying Flapper of Freeport” the Long Island native was one of the youngest flying pioneers in history and the first female test pilot for two major aircraft companies.
One particular incident in her early history illustrates her spirit. At 17 she was already working as a pilot, ferrying passengers between Long Island and Roosevelt Island, when boys at her high school goaded her into taking off on her own. She flew west, then south, dipping under all of the East River’s four bridges. The next day the Times reported that “Miss Smith was informed here that the Department of Commerce might ‘ground’ her for her stunt, but she said that she would rather take that chance than disappoint a number of persons who had expected her to carry out her plan.”
In the end, she was grounded for 10 days, but she kept flying into her old age, even landing an experimental flight at 89. In her autobiography Smith remembered her first time aloft at the age of 6 “By the time the pilot touched the wheels gently to earth, I knew my future in airplanes and flying was as inevitable as the freckles on my nose,” she wrote.
