Flash in the Sky

Elinor Smith was a world-class pilot before she was out of her teens -- and probably a better one than the more famous Amelia Earhart

By Laura Muha

Article tools

E-mail

Share
- Digg
- Del.icio.us
- Facebook
- Fark
- Google
- Newsvine
- Reddit
- Yahoo

Elinor Smith wrapped both hands around the control stick and held on tightly as her open-cockpit biplane pitched and jounced through the night sky.

WHAM! A violent jolt of turbulence sent the plane plummeting. Quickly, Smith jammed the throttle open, regaining control just as -- WHAM! -- more turbulence rocked the little craft.

Anxiously, she peered at her watch. It was just before midnight on Jan. 30, 1929 -- 10 hours since the Freeport teenager had taken off from Mitchel Field in an attempt to break the women's solo endurance record.

The temperature had been dropping rapidly since sundown, and was now 8 degrees. The bitter cold seeped through Smith's leather flight suit; inside her fur-lined gloves, her fingers were numb. The chamois mask she wore to protect her face was unbearably itchy, despite the layer of cold cream her mother had rubbed into her skin before takeoff. And with every breath, moisture built up inside the mask, steaming up her goggles.

Clumsily, Smith loosened her seatbelt, hoping to ease the cramps that wracked her legs after hours of sitting. WHAM! A moment later, turbulence hurled her half out of the cockpit.

Her heart pounding, she managed to tighten the belt again -- only to discover that the stabilizer, which enabled her to keep the plane level as the aircraft's center of gravity changed, was frozen in one position.

For the next few hours, the 17-year-old aviator battled exhaustion, cold, turbulence and equipment problems as she desperately tried to figure out what to do. She circled central Nassau County, then headed south and flew up and down Sunrise Highway, figuring it would make a good emergency landing strip. Although she had planned to stay aloft for 18 hours, breaking the old endurance record of 12 hours by a wide margin, it was rapidly becoming obvious to Smith she couldn't hold out that long.

But ending her flight before daybreak presented another problem. Despite her considerable experience as a pilot -- Smith had been taking flying lessons since she was 8 - she had never landed a plane at night, and wasn't sure she'd be able to.

In the days before the invention of sophisticated instrumentation, a pilot's ability to land an aircraft depended largely on his or her depth perception, which Smith knew could be seriously impaired in the dark. Couple that with an icy, dimly lit field and an airplane half-full of high-test gasoline, and she was facing a potential disaster. ``If I hit something,`' she recalls, ``I knew what the outcome would be: KABOOM!''

Still, what choice did she have? She couldn't bail out and risk the possibility of her pilotless plane plunging into someone's house. So bracing her knees against the stick to keep the plane level, she reached for her flare gun and fired it once, to let the ground crew know she was coming in.

Almost simultaneously, Smith saw another aircraft circling slowly, deliberately below her. The pilot -- whom she later learned was famed Army flier Jimmy Doolittle, returning from a test flight to Philadelphia -- had realized she was in trouble and was showing her how to line up her ship for a night landing.

Afraid to so much as blink, she cut the throttle and followed him in, setting her plane easily on the frozen field. ``I just sat there for a minute and thanked God I was down,'' recalls Smith, now 86 and living in Santa Cruz, Calif. ``It was the worst flight of my life!''

Still, when she landed at Mitchel Field at 3:30 a.m. on Jan. 31, 1929, she had been in the air for 13 hours, 16 minutes and 45 seconds.

Elinor Patricia Smith, a petite, freckle-faced teenager, had just set the first of her many world's records.

Her name is not nearly as recognizable as that of her friend and fellow flier Amelia Earhart. But Smith was widely acclaimed as one of the great pilots of her era. Many considered her more accomplished than Earhart, whose longer career and eventual disappearance in the Pacific in 1937 burnished her mystique in the annals of early aviation.

Smith was among the flashiest and most colorful of early aviators. Newsreels of her feats played in movie houses around the country, front-page headlines proclaimed her the '`youthful air queen,'` and in 1930, when she was only 19, she was voted best female pilot in the country by her fellow fliers. At the Smithsonian Institution's National Air and Space Museum in Washington, D.C., where Smith's name hangs in the Golden Age of Flight gallery, curator Dorothy Cochrane says Smith deserves far more public recognition than she gets: ``She's not a household word, but she probably should be, because she did some really significant flying.`'

``We were always waiting to see what Ellie would do next,'' recalls Glen Head resident George Dade, 85, who grew up on Curtiss Field and watched admiringly as Smith flew longer, higher, faster than any woman before her.

Smith knew she was destined to be a pilot almost from the minute she saw her first airplane, at age 6. She had gone on a Sunday drive with her parents and younger brother and saw a sign on a road near Hicksville: ``Airplane Rides -- $5 and $10.'' Parked nearby in a potato field was a contraption that looked as if it had been made from Tinkertoys, with a bullet-shaped object that turned out to be the cockpit jutting from the front. ``To my brother Joe and I, it was Star Wars!'' Smith recalls, laughing.

Smith's father, vaudevillian Tom Smith, pulled over and began talking to the pilot. Eighty years later, his daughter still remembers every detail of what happened next: how Tom Smith tied her blond braids together so they wouldn't blow around; how he lifted her and Joe into the cockpit and buckled the seatbelt over them, the thrill she felt as the plane lurched across the field and into the sky. Then there was the view, more breathtaking than she could have imagined.

``I could see out over the Atlantic Ocean, I could see the fields, I could even see the Sound,'' she recalls. ``And the clouds on that particular day had just broken open so there were these shafts of light coming down and lighting up this whole landscape in various greens and yellows.''