On August 1, 1911 Harriet Quimby became the first woman in the U.S. to earn a pilot’s certificate from the Aero Club of America. In April, 1912 she was the first woman to pilot across the English Channel but tragically fell to her death from her Bleriot monoplane in July of that year.
Quimby was a visionary trailblazer who fiercely used her career as a prominent journalist and screenwriter to prove that aviation was not exclusively a man’s domain. When she made her historic solo flight across the English Channel on April 16, 1912, she did so in a fragile aircraft, navigating blind through freezing, dense fog with only a watch and a hand-held compass. Shockingly, her monumental achievement was entirely buried by the global press because the RMS Titanic had hit an iceberg and sunk just a day prior. Her tragic death a mere three months later occurred during an exhibition flight in Boston, where a sudden, violent gust of wind caused her plane to pitch forward, ejecting both Quimby and her passenger into the bay below before an audience of horrified spectators.
