Evelyn Bryan Johnson: Just has over 50,000 hours in the air...

Every day I input a handful of names into the Women Aviators Wiki. Today I came across the story of Evelyn Bryan Johnson, and I'm somewhat ashamed to admit that this is the first time I've heard of her.

She was born in 1909 and is still alive at the time of this writing...although she stopped her flight instructor training in 2006 as the result of glaucoma, she is still the manager of the Morristown, Tenn., city airport. At 100 years old, she still doesn't feel old enough to retire.

She's in the Guinness Book of World Records: the 57,635.4 flight hours she has logged during her career are the most flying hours of record for any female pilot.

Her male counterpart, John Edward "Ed" Long, has more than 64,000 hours -- seven years -- in the air.

Read more at:
http://www.avweb.com/news/profiles/182968-1.html

Hilary Swank stars as Amelia Earhart

I've been doing some research on Amelia Earhart lately, and just now came across the fact that a movie has been made of her, to be released in 2009, presumably. It's currently in post-production.

Hilary Swank stars as Amelia Earhart, and Ewen McGregor stars as Gene Vidal (a good friend of Amelia's and father of Gore Vidal). Richard Gere plays George Putnam, Amelia's husband, and Mia Wasikowska plays Elinor Smith.


Will be interesting to see how the movie unfolds. Amelia Earhart was 23 before she started flying, and never wanted to get married. George Putnam was divorced by his wife (who got remarried about a month later), and married Amelia. It was a marriage of convenience - Amelia sends a letter to him pointing out that she doesn't expect him to be exclusive to her, or she to him - he is just going to promotoe her flying career.

In their early years together they were apparently quite fond of each other, but according to Doris Rich, Amelia was sick of him by the start of her final round the world flight...he was selfish, bombastic, etc. etc.

Just because it was a marriage of convenience doesn't mean Putnam was a "beard." By all accounts Amelia was heterosexual, quite attractive in person, and vivacious around friends (pace those photos of her which make her look like a thin stick) she had many male friends, at least one, Gene Vidal, linked to her romantically after her marriage to Putnam.

How good of a flyer was Amelia? Doris Rich comments quite a few times that she wasn't very good at landings....and Elinor Smith, quoted years later, wasn't impressed with her either. However, she and Jackie Cochran were firm friends, and although Edna Gardner Whyte didn't think she should be racing pylons, the two of them were friends as well.

I'll cover Amelia's life in more detail in an article I'm writing for the Winged Victory: Women in Aviation website (http://winged-victory.com).

As far as the movie goes, this is actually the first I've heard of it - although it was apparently announced by Variety in 2008, and the IMDB entry already has a thriving message board about it. Looks very much like they're going to make it a triangle between Earhart, Putnam and Vidal...

http://www.imdb.com/title/tt1129445/

In 1994 there was a TV movie about Amelia starring Diane Keaton, with Rutger Hauer as Fred Noonan and Bruce Dern as Putnam. It was based on Doris Rich's book. It's out on VHS, but not DVD.




However, there's a few documentaries...

As for books, although Doris Rich's book was the first Earhart biography, I have some issues with it, which I'll cover in my article, however you can get it here:



A more recent biography, which goes into much more detail about Amelia's forbears, is

Amelia Earhart on Youtube

There's quite a bit of footage of Amelia Earhart at YouTube.


Last footageof Amelia Earhart




Where Is Amelia Earhart - a documentary

Amelia Earhart newsreel


Amelia christens a Terrapane, 1932



Amelia's Lockheed Vega - documentary on Earhart's legacy


Amelia Earhart song, First Lady of the Air


Amelia Earhart and Jerrie Mock

Interview with Nancy Welz Aldrich

Up on Winged Avenger: Women in Aviation, is an interview with Nancy Welz Aldrich, aka Captain Gramma.

http://thethunderchild.com/YouFlyGirl/Interviews/NancyAldrichInterview.html

Aldrich's book Captain Gramma: Single Woman to Sky High is an inspiring book for anybody, but in particular middle-aged women whose children have moved out into the wide world (would it be more politic to call them "empty nesters") who think..what can I do with the rest of my life?

Nancy Aldrich was in her mid-thirties, divorced, with one grown child and one eighteen year old, when she decided on Mother's Day, 1977 to take the flying lessons that she'd always wanted. She enjoyed the flying as much as she'd expected, and decided to make of it a career. With great perseverance - it was the late 1970s and women and commercial airline captain were two words that were very rare together - Aldrich was hired by United Airlines and moved her way up the ranks to captain. She retired as a Captain at the mandatory age of 60, in 1999.

In Captain Gramma, she tells her story.
Read our review at: http://thethund.ipower.com//YouFlyGirl/BookReviews/CaptainGramma.html

Her website, where you can get the book, is http://www.captaingramma.com/

OT: FIrst female sea captain dies at 93

Daily Press (Hampton Roads, VA) reported yesterday that Molly K. Carney has died, at the age of 93.

As Molly Kool, she was the first woman in North America to become a licensed ship captain.

Molly Kool, although she died in Bangor, Maine, was born and raised in Canada. She won her captain's papers in 1939 and sailed the Atlantic Ocean between Alma, New Brunswick, Canada and Boston for five years.

(In other words, thanks to the World War which sucked men out of the work force, women were given their opportunity to shine..)

Her father was a Dutch ship captain, and she was 23 when she got her own papers. She sailed her father's 70 foot boat in the "dangerous waters of the Bay of Fundy).

In 1944 she married and left New Brunswick for Maine. Her first husband died after 20 years of marriage, she then married John CArney.

She appeared on an episode of Ripley's Believe It or Not.

Andrea Read, flight instructor at Spitfire Aviation

There's an article today in an online newspaper called Daily Sound which is a profile on Andrea Read.

The title is "FLight School Continues to Soar" and the first 3 paras are:

Most pilots with the sort of flight time that Andrea Read has under her belt are flying the “heavy metal” as senior captains at major airlines.

The 40-year-old has logged approximately 14,000 hours in the cockpit, equating to more than a year and a half spent airborne.

She passed many of those hours in a four-seater Cessna 172 as president, chief pilot and certified flight instructor at Spitfire Aviation, a company based at the Santa Barbara Municipal Airport that celebrates its 10-year anniversary this month.

Nice to know some general aviation companies are still managing to float in this disaster of an economy the Dems are giving us.... forgive political rant, but Obama and his policies are going to spell financial ruin for this country!)

The article then says:

As a female pilot and flight instructor, Read says she stands out in a male-dominated industry. That has paid off in terms of gender diversity among her clients.

While just 3 percent of licensed pilots are women, Read says roughly 15 percent of her students are women.

I thought 6% of licensed pilots today were women...and that ratio has held steady since 1911! I wonder where they get those numbers from?

Here's the part I really like, Read owns Spitfire Aviation:

In the past 10 years, Spitfire Aviation has seen dramatic changes as well. When she started the business in March 1999, Read had one plane and one full-time instructor — herself.

Now she owns eight planes, employs four flight instructors, brokers plane sales and runs a full-service maintenance hangar

You fly, girl!

The Ugliest Planes That Actually Flew

I've got a tremendous amount of work I should be doing right now, not least of which is formatting my interview of Captain Gramma author Nancy Aldrich, but I've been working on a certain project for two days straight and I'm at the point where I have to veg for a few hours.

And what better way to veg than surf the web?

I found this page of photos of "The Ugliest Planes That Actually Flew" and they are certainly a treat to look at.

http://www.airlineempires.net/content/view/274/79/

Delanne Duo-Mono
Handley Page Heyford
Westland Lysander P-12
Pemberton-Billing PB - 25
Westland-Hill Pterodactyl
Linke - Hofmann R1
Breguet 765 Sahara
Caproni Stipa
Stout Amphibian
Vedo Villi
Caproni Ca.60