Fly Girls by Keith O'Brien

Author:Keith O'Brien
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
Publisher: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt

KLINGENSMITH GLIDED PAST the men on the airfield, wearing light green riding pants, a brown jacket, a beret, and a smile. At the microphone, she shrugged off the accolades. “I’m going out to try to give the boys a race,” she said, modest and demure. That was all. “I’ll tell you more about it after it’s over.” But away from the microphone and the crowd, Klingensmith had to admit she felt good—she had reached a pivotal moment in her life, and she knew it. She was ready.

“I’m feeling lucky today,” she said, flipping a quarter to an attendant outside the women’s restroom. She expected to challenge the men for the three-foot trophy and the money: $3,600 for first place, $2,000 for second, $1,200 for third, $800 for fourth, and $400 for fifth. Maybe she wouldn’t win, but she would place. “The plane is fast enough,” Kling­ensmith said, “and I can fly it.”

All that weekend at the airfield, the men had been having fun at her expense. The day before, the announcer broadcast rumors of her love life over the public address system. Klingensmith was forced to show him her ringless left hand to prove she was not married. Reporters had also needled her, questioning whether she truly thought women were equal to men in aviation. Sure, the women could fly, one reporter said. But none of them really understood how an airplane worked. None of them had ever taken apart an engine.

“Ah, but I have,” Klingensmith shot back. “Ask the men if I don’t know all about planes. Ask them if I don’t do all my own mechanical work. I learned planes from the ground up. I’m as good with a plane as any man.”

Now, settling into the cockpit of the Gee Bee with a parachute strapped on her back, a tan leather helmet on her head, and goggles pulled down over her eyes, she set out to prove it. Klingensmith placed her left hand on the throttle, her right hand on the stick, and both feet on the rudder pedals, fixing her eyes on the instrument panel before her. As the engine roared to life, she could feel its strength—670 horsepower. “Souped up,” the boys on the ground said, “beyond any reasonable factor of mechanical or structural safety.” It shrieked to get into the sky, and in no time at all, Klingensmith was in the air.

From the cockpit, she could see the three steel pylons laid out in a triangular course in the northwest corner of the field—far enough from the grandstand to keep the crowd safe in the event of a crash but still close enough that the fans could watch everything: the moves, the dips, and the whipping turns that required the utmost coordination and experience. To make each turn, Klingensmith and the six male pilots had to fly fifty to a hundred feet off the ground at speeds exceeding 220 miles an hour, using both the stick and the rudder pedals to cut each corner. They

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.