The heroines who raced to conquer the Atlantic (and often died trying)

These daring women ‘risked everything’ to be the first to fly the gruelling, 3,000-mile journey

In May 1927, Charles Lind­bergh made the first solo non-stop transat­lantic flight. He trav­elled from New York to Paris, through icy fog and deep fatigue. It took him over 33 hours. Spurred on by Lind­bergh’s feat, sev­eral women in Bri­tain and Amer­ica wanted to prove that it wasn’t just men who could endure that gruelling, lonely, 3,000-mile jour­ney: whether it was as pilots or pas­sen­gers, they could do it too.

Frances Grayson was one such pion­eer. She was 35, with a failed mar­riage and sev­eral abort­ive careers behind her. Two days before Christ­mas 1927, amid dis­astrous weather warn­ings, she and a crew of three men – pilot, engin­eer, radio oper­ator – took off from Long Island. Aim­ing for a first stop on New­found­land, the team flew north-east over Cape Cod and headed out to sea. They were never seen again.

As the social his­tor­ian Midge Gil­lies writes in Atlantic Fur­ies, her detailed and enjoy­able sur­vey of “the women who risked everything to be the first to fly”, Grayson’s “final moments must have been hor­rific… [and] plunging into the icy sea bey­ond ter­ri­fy­ing.” The avi­AT­LANTIC atrix had left a state­ment to be read in the event of her death. Her motive appeared to have been merely the determ­in­a­tion that her life amount to something – “or I become a little nobody”.

Grayson’s loss did little to deter other women. For, as Gil­lies bril­liantly con­veys, fly­ing long-dis­tance – and doing it, even­tu­ally, solo – wasn’t simply about the thrills and risks involved in con­quer­ing the ele­ments. For women in the 1920s, transat­lantic flight was also about rising above their situ­ation in life, avoid­ing bore­dom by seek­ing adven­ture, and, just as the suf­fra­gettes were doing in the Brit­ish polit­ical sphere, prov­ing the need for equal­ity.

Such flights were ardu­ous. They involved long hours of con­cen­tra­tion, often in freez­ing and noisy con­di­tions. The smal­lest lapse could prove fatal. The fuel needed to cross an ocean was so heavy it threatened to destabil­ise the plane. Given the length of the jour­ney and lack of places to stop, cof­fee was wel­comed, though since it was almost impossible for women to urin­ate dur­ing a flight, Gil­lies spec­u­lates that they prob­ably resor­ted to adult nap­pies.

It wasn’t easy for female avi­at­ors to find teach­ers, or hus­bands who would allow their spouses to fly in any role. If a woman was able to gain exper­i­ence, it was prob­ably by under­tak­ing short flights that involved the aid of land­marks, not fly­ing solely by instru­ments –

which the Atlantic cross­ing, over so much fea­ture­less water, would demand. It’s per­haps unsur­pris­ing, then, that the “Fur­ies” of Gil­lies’s title – six women who were determ­ined to cross the ocean in 1927 and 1928 – accu­mu­lated at least 15 mar­riages between them, and struggled to be taken ser­i­ously in what Gil­lies calls the “testoster­onesoaked world of fly­ing”.

Many such would-be pilots didn’t have fin­an­cial resources of their own; they needed back­ers to pay for the machinery and crew. Lady Anne Savile was a wealthy widow and fly­ing enthu­si­ast; when she attemp­ted the flight (as a pas­sen­ger) in August 1927, neither she nor her two male crew made it. The Hon Elsie Mackay, a former act­ress and jockey, was 35 in March 1928 when she attemp­ted the east-west cross­ing, but she did so in secret, hop­ing this would pre­vent her fam­ily from try­ing to stop her. Her plane, Endeav­our, like­wise van­ished.

One pivotal char­ac­ter in Gil­lies’s book is Amy Guest, a wealthy Amer­ican and mother-of-three. She’d grown up as a tom­boy with an adven­tur­ous spirit and hoped to become the first female transat­lantic pilot her­self, but she was talked out of that in favour of sup­port­ing another ama­teur: Amelia Ear­hart. Guest duly ploughed mil­lions into sup­port­ing Ear­hart’s quest. By early 1928, six months after Grayson’s dis­aster, Ear­hart was mak­ing ser­i­ous plans and vying for the achieve­ment with Mabel Boll, a bar­tender’s daugh­ter who’d mar­ried a wealthy busi­ness­man and was renowned for wear­ing as many as 33 dia­mond brace­lets on one arm.

On June 3 1928, in Boston, Ear­hart climbed aboard her Fok­ker F.VIIb Tri-Motor (named Friend­ship). Her pilot was Bill Stultz; the co-pilot was Slim Gor­don. Ear­hart wedged her­self into a cramped seat behind the pair, next to some addi­tional fuel tanks, and they took off. After stop­ping in New­found­land, where they spent two weeks groun­ded by bad weather – Boll and her crew were already on the island, stuck in the same pos­i­tion – they took their chance, and lif­ted off again, head­ing east. After 20 hours and 40 minutes, they safely landed in Burry Port, south Wales, mak­ing Ear­hart the first woman to fly across the Atlantic.

The last leg of Friend­ship’s jour­ney took it from Burry Port to Southamp­ton, where Ear­hart was mobbed as if she had been the one at the con­trols. She dis­avowed all the praise, call­ing her­self “bag­gage”; but she was a bud­ding pilot her­self, and hav­ing now wit­nessed what was involved, she couldn’t rest until she made the flight solo. In 1931 she mar­ried the pub­lisher George Put­nam, a dec­ade older than her, set­ting him the con­di­tion that she be free to pur­sue her career. He was sup­port­ive, see­ing the pub­lish­ing oppor­tun­it­ies in Ear­hart’s feats. In May 1932, five years after Lind­bergh’s his­toric flight, she suc­ceeded.

Then, on 1 June 1937, Ear­hart and her nav­ig­ator, Fred Noonan, attemp­ted to fly around the world. After trav­el­ling over the con­tin­ental US, down through the Carib­bean and South Amer­ica, to Africa and across most of Asia, they reached New Guinea on June 29. They took off again on July 2, in deteri­or­at­ing weather, after which Ear­hart was never seen again. She was declared leg­ally dead in 1939; the­or­ies about her death con­tinue to this day, not least on account of the dis­cov­ery of bones and some items of cloth­ing on the vol­canic atoll of Niku­maroro.

Even if Ear­hart failed in one sense, she suc­ceeded in another. Her mys­ter­i­ous, unsolved death has fixed her place in the pub­lic ima­gin­a­tion as a woman who per­man­ently changed the per­cep­tions of what women could achieve – and not just in fly­ing. As Gil­lies’s book makes abund­antly clear, the “Atlantic Fur­ies” had to fight relent­lessly; their goal as to have what women could do, if given a chance. And yet, today, there are still rel­at­ively low num­bers of women in the avi­ation indus­tries: fewer than eight per­cent of private pilots are women; Ear­hart and co were trail­blazers – but almost 90 years on, women are a long way from dom­in­at­ing the skies.

Read the review on The Telegraph website