Charles Lindbergh beside Spirit of St. Louis before take off (below) on May
20th from Roosevelt Field in Garden City, Nassau County, New York.
Nearly a thousand people assembled at Roosevelt Field to see Charles Lindbergh off on his historic flight.
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Jacqueline Cochran stands in front of the Canadian-built F-86 Sabre jet, in which
she became the first woman to break the sound barrier. Cochran flew over Rogers
Dry Lake, California at an average speed of 652.337 miles-per-hour. Among her
other aviation firsts: She was the first woman to take off from an aircraft carrier, the
first woman to reach Mach 2, the first pilot to make a blind instrument landing and
the first woman inducted into the Aviation Hall of Fame.
1962
As the world’s first airline stewardess, war heroine, and aviation pioneer Ellen
Church (above) created a new and exciting profession for young girls of the
twentieth century. While working as a registered nurse in San Francisco, Ellen
was employed by Boeing Air Transport (BAT), the predecessor to United airlines
in 1930. she soon organized the pioneer group, "Sky Girls" (pictured below).The
eight girls, all registered nurses, were hired as stewardess on their flights for a
three-month trial run. It was the beginning of what other airlines thought at the
time to be a bold experiment.
The “Sky Girls”
The Boeing tri-motor
Major Howard “Scrappy” Johnson (above) set a world altitude record, reaching 91,243 feet, flying a YF-104A from Edwards AFB in California.
Major Johnson (center) being congratulated by fellow test pilots Captain
Walter Irwin (left), and Captain Jim Low (right).
Charles Augustus Lindbergh was an aviator, author, inventor, explorer,and
social activist. Lindbergh, then a 25-year old U.S. Air Mail pilot, emerged to
almost instantaneous world fame as the result of his solo non-stop flight on
May 20-21, 1927, from Roosevelt Field on New York’s Long island to Paris,
France, a distance of nearly 3,600 miles in the Spirit of St. Louis, a single-
seat, single-engine monoplane (shown below). Lindberg, who was an
officer in the U.S. Army reserve, was awarded the nations highest
military decoration, the Medal of Honor. He died in 1974 at age 72.
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