The Daring Book for Girls - Andrea J. Buchanan [62]
Jacqueline Cochran, who in 1953 became the first woman to break the sound barrier, holds more distance and speed records than any pilot, male or female. She was the first woman to take off from and land on an aircraft carrier; to reach Mach 2; to fly a fixed-wing jet aircraft across the Atlantic; to enter the Bendix Trans-continental Race; and to pilot a bomber across the north Atlantic. She was the first pilot to make a blind landing, the first woman in Ohio’s Aviation Hall of Fame, and the only woman to ever be president of the Fédération Aéronautique Internationale.
the pilots flew low to buzz the crowd, and later said of the experience, “I did not understand it at the time, but I believe that little red airplane said something to me as it swished by.” The next year, she visited an airfield and was given a ride; a few hundred feet in the air and she was hooked. She began working odd jobs, including driving a truck and working at a telephone company, to earn money for flying lessons with female aviator Anita “Neta” Snook. After six months of lessons, she bought her own plane, a used yellow biplane that she nicknamed “The Canary,” and in October 1922 she flew it to an altitude of 14,000 feet, setting a world record for women pilots. In May 1923, Earhart became the sixteenth woman to be issued a pilot’s license by the Fédération Aéronautique Internationale (FAI). She not only broke aviation records, she also formed a women’s flying
Amelia Earhart
organization (The Ninety-Nines) and wrote bestselling books. She was the first woman to fly across the Atlantic, the first woman to fly across the Atlantic alone, and the first person, man or woman, to fly across the Atlantic alone twice. Earhart was also the first woman to fly an autogyro (a kind of flying craft) and the first person to cross the United States in an autogyro; the first person to fly solo across the Pacific between Honolulu and Oakland, California; the first person to fly solo nonstop from Mexico City to Newark, New Jersey; and the first woman to fly nonstop coast-to-coast across the United States. Her final accomplishment was becoming an enduring mystery: at age thirty-nine, in 1937, Amelia Earhart disappeared over the Pacific Ocean during an attempt at making a circumnavigational flight. The official search efforts lasted nine days, but Amelia Earhart was never found.
Alexandra David-Néel
ALEXANDRA DAVID-NÉEL
Alexandra David-Néel, born Louise Eugénie Alexandrine Marie David (1868-1969), was the first European woman to travel to the forbidden city of Lhasa, Tibet, in 1924, when it was still closed to foreigners. She was a French explorer, spiritualist, Buddhist, and writer, penning over thirty books on Eastern religion, philosophy, and the experiences she had on her travels. By the time she was eighteen, she had already made solo trips to England, Spain, and Switzerland, and when she was twenty-two, she went to India, returning to France only when she ran out of money. She married railroad engineer Philippe Néel in 1904, and in 1911 she returned to India to study Buddhism at the royal monastery of Sikkim, where she met the Crown Prince Sidkeon Tulku. In 1912 she met the thirteenth Dalai Lama twice and was able to ask him questions about Buddhism. She deepened her study of spirituality when she spent two years living in a cave in Sikkim, near the Tibetan border. It was there that she met the young Sikkimese monk Aphur Yongden, who became her lifelong traveling companion, and whom she would later adopt. The two trespassed into Tibetan territory in 1916, meeting the Panchen Lama, but were evicted by British authorities. They left for Japan, traveled through China, and in 1924 arrived in Lhasa, Tibet, disguised as pilgrims. They lived there for two months. In 1928, Alexandra separated from her husband and settled in Digne, France, where she spent the next ten years writing books about her adventures. She reconciled with her husband and traveled again with her adopted son in 1937, at age sixty-nine, going through the Soviet Union to China,