Phoebe and Vernon Omlie: From Barnstormers to Aviation Innovators

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Phoebe Fairgrave Omlie never achieved the worldwide fame accorded Amelia Earhart, but she certainly ranked in the upper echelon of women fliers who did their utmost to focus the nation’s attention on aviation. She also contributed more than a little to the struggle for gender equality.

Born in 1902, shortly before Wilbur and Orville Wright made history at Kitty Hawk, N.C., Fairgrave was raised in St. Paul, Minn. In high school she fell hopelessly in love with the thought of flying. A visit by President Woodrow Wilson to Minneapolis to promote interest in the League of Nations triggered her aviation love affair — accidentally. As his motorcade proceeded to the capitol, National Guard airplanes flew overhead. Phoebe was in physics class when the procession passed her high school. While the other students looked down at the parade, Phoebe gazed up at the spectacle in the sky. ‘That’s what I’m going to do!’ she shouted, waving toward the planes. ‘I’m going to fly.’

After graduation, two weeks of work as a stenographer convinced the 18-year-old to turn her back on humdrum office life. She headed for a Minneapolis airfield operated by Curtiss Northwest Flying Company and started pestering pilots to take her aloft. After several days one finally agreed, thinking he would frighten her out of the notion permanently. The pilot, at the instigation of the airfield manager, gave the persistent teenager the works — a few loops, some rolls and a nose dive or two — hoping to make her good and sick. Fairgrave, however, was not dismayed. The trip had quite the opposite effect. She demanded more. After her fourth flight, she plunked down $3,500 her late grandfather had left her and became the proud owner of a Curtiss JN-4 ‘Jenny.’

While learning to fly her plane, Fairgrave began to consider the possibility of performing acrobatics on the wing with a seasoned pilot at the controls high in the sky, a dangerous-looking stunt then coming into vogue. She soon developed a routine that included performing the Charleston and hanging by her teeth while the plane flew several thousand feet above the crowds that invariably gathered to watch. Often she would end her performance by leaping from the wing and falling for several hundred feet before opening her parachute.

After some months spent honing her skills, Fairgrave announced that she would set a world’s record for women’s parachute jumping. She proposed to leap from the dizzying height of 15,000 feet — nearly three miles above the astounded citizens of Minneapolis. Today, when space walks and sky-diving former presidents are a matter of routine, that sounds like small potatoes, but in 1921 it was a bold move — particularly for a teenage girl.

Flying and acrobatics were not the only skills Fairgrave had been practicing during those months between high school graduation and her record-breaking parachute jump. She had also been learning to impress the press. After she informed her cronies at the flying field about her new objective, she stopped by the St. Paul Pioneer Press and let them in on her plans — a pattern she was to repeat in coming years. All the coverage she garnered in this and later stunts enhanced her reputation as a ‘daring angel of the skies.’

Fairgrave’s regular pilot may have thought the proposed jump was too dangerous, forcing her to find another flier. Whatever the reason, she asked pilot Vernon C. Omlie to fly her to the unprecedented altitude (for a parachute jump) of almost three miles. On July 10, 1921, as ‘thousands lined the fence around the Curtiss Flying Field,’ according to the Pioneer Press,’she stepped nonchalantly off the wing of the airplane.’ Twenty minutes later, motorists who had watched her descent as they drove toward the landing spot picked up the smiling teenager in New Brighton, Minn., some miles from the flying field.

The Minneapolis Sunday Tribune blared Fairgrave’s accomplishment from its front page. The lead paragraph made the most of her daring leap: ‘[Going] from a frigid Alaskan atmosphere of 10 degrees below zero back to the torture temperature of 98 degrees in the shade, all in 20 minutes, Phoebe Fairgrave of St. Paul said, today was the most thrilling experience she enjoyed yesterday when she shattered altitude records with a leap of 15,200 feet. Today Miss Fairgrave was packing her grip, preparing to leave for Iowa to join a flying circus.’

Tags: Adventurers & Trail Blazers, Aviation History, Women's History

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