Harriet Quimby, here in 1911, was America's first licensed woman pilot. (Library of Congress)

"In those days…they kissed you good-by and trusted to luck you'd get back."

The homespun movie star and aviation buff Will Rogers couldn't help laughing as he watched eager pilots rev up to start the biggest women's air race the nation had ever seen. When a couple of them glanced into their mirrors before climbing into the cockpit, he wisecracked, "It looks like a powder-puff derby to me."

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The nickname stuck, but there was nothing frivolous about the 20 fliers who took off in August 1929 in the first Women's Air Derby, an eight-day race from Santa Monica to Cleveland that included 15 stops they had to locate using only road maps and dead reckoning. The women all wanted to prove they could fly as fast and as far as men. Likewise, there was nothing frivolous about the rough country and inevitable mishaps that lay ahead. Pancho Barnes collided with a spectator's car when she landed her Travel Air biplane in Pecos, Texas, and Ruth Nichols crashed into a tractor with her Rearwin K-R in Columbus. Both women walked away with minor injuries, but Marvel Crosson, who had previously spent six years flying in sub-Arctic Alaska and Canada, was not so lucky. She apparently succumbed to carbon monoxide fumes in mid-flight and her body was found in the Arizona desert next to her wrecked clipped-wing Travel Air.

The sentimental favorite of the race was Amelia Earhart. She had made headlines the year before as the first woman to fly across the Atlantic—as a passenger, not a pilot—and would later attain legendary status when she mysteriously disappeared while attempting a solo flight around the world in 1937. Earhart placed a respectable third among the 14 pilots who finished the Women's Air Derby. But she was far from the most accomplished pilot in the race. That distinction belonged to Louise Thaden, who was already the holder of simultaneous women's records for speed (156 mph), altitude (20,260 feet) and endurance (22-plus hours), and easily took first in the Air Derby, completing the 2,700-mile zigzag route in a total of 20 hours, 19 minutes flying time. Nor was Earhart the most daring aviatrix of her era. A host of other women, whose exploits are now largely forgotten, were just as brash and, in some cases, a lot more foolhardy.

Earhart had just turned 13 in 1910 when an adventurous young New Yorker named Blanche Stuart Scott headed west to become the first woman to drive a car from coast to coast. It took Scott 69 roundabout days, and her biggest inspiration was not the scenery, but what she saw at Dayton, Ohio. There she met the Wright brothers, teaching flying seven years after they made the first airplane flight at Kitty Hawk, N.C. She was hooked. On returning east, she signed up for lessons with another aviation pioneer, Glenn H. Curtiss.

"In those days, they didn't take you up in the air to teach you," Scott recalled years later. "They told you this and that. You got in. They kissed you good-by and trusted to luck you'd get back."

On September 5, 1910, Scott climbed into what she called "an undertaker's chair" in front of "a motor that sounded like a whirling bolt in a dish pan." The wooden pusher propeller blew her bloomers and three petticoats like sails as she started along the runway. Curtiss had fixed a governor to the engine; she was supposed to practice taxiing only. But either the governor failed to keep the plane from being lifted by a gust of wind—or she intentionally flipped it away—and she was suddenly airborne. She rose 40 feet before settling safely back to earth. It wasn't much of a flight, being officially undocumented and apparently accidental. But it was first.

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