The Wild Air

by Rebecca Mascull

Genres: Historical Fiction; Literary Fiction

Synopsis

In 1909 aeroplanes are practically unheard of, let alone female pilots.

When Della Dobbs's great aunt comes to visit her family in Cleethorpes, Della's path in life changes forever. Auntie Betty has come home from Kitty Hawk, North Carolina, across whose windswept dunes the Wright Brothers tested their flying machines. Through her aunt's stories of 'giant birds' and a shared love of flying kites, Della decides she wants to learn how to fly a plane and Betty is determined to help her do so.

Against all the odds, Della becomes a famed pilot just as World War I begins and she decides to marry her childhood sweetheart, Dudley.

Inspired by his wife, Dudley joins the Royal Flying Corps and during the war, goes missing in France. Della defies all advice from the military and decides to fly across the channel in the hope of finding her husband alive.

Uplifting and page-turning, THE WILD AIR is a story about following your dreams against all odds, and finding love in the process.

(P)2017 Hodder & Stoughton

Release date: May 4, 2017

Publisher: Hodder & Stoughton

Print pages: 400

Sample

This is my third published historical novel and thus I’ve been engaged in the process of research for quite a few years now. I’ve learnt that you need books and libraries and the internet and visits to key locations, but more than anything, you need people. I’m still astounded by the generosity of strangers when researching and writing my books, as well as honoured by the same from friends and family. I’m also so grateful that some of these strangers have then become friends, through our mutual interest in what to me is a new topic and to them is often a life-long beloved subject in which they are an acknowledged expert. This novel has been no exception. I have many people to thank, who have helped me immeasurably along the way.

First and foremost, I have one person in particular to thank, without whom this book would be a shadow of what it has become, who completely engaged with the whole idea from the first moment of hearing about it! This person is ace pilot Robert Millinship. For talking to me over several hours on a cold, dark October afternoon at the Shuttleworth Collection, allowing me to climb up and sit in the Avro triplane, shivering and nervous as I was, to imagine Della’s dawn lessons. For countless emails and phone calls, discussing the finer points of Edwardian flight. For reading the first draft and editing it with copious post-it notes. And most of all, for taking me flying, in the Cessna and the Pitts, for knowing I’d be frightened but it would soon turn to joy, for showing me the earth as birds see it.

The other person I’d like to single out is Papa. This is my own grandfather, who went to fight in the First World War in 1916, who luckily contracted influenza which brought him home, and even more luckily did not die from it. My Papa – Arthur Leslie Chadwick – was a lovely, kind and gentle man who I think about often, though he died over thirty years ago. His journey to war inspired me in the writing of this book and helped me feel closer to him. Miss you, old chap.

Huge gratitude also goes to:

Everyone who helped me at the Shuttleworth Collection at Old Warden – Ciara Harper, Marketing and Communications Manager; Ken Hyde, Collection Volunteer; and Roger ‘Dodge’ Bailey, expert pilot for the Collection. Ciara for organising and Ken for his brilliant introduction to the machines and how they work. Particular thanks to Dodge for his expertise on Blackburns and horsemanship, as well as his detailed and generous help, which even extended to taking photographs of Blackburn parts from various angles and labelling them most helpfully!

The staff of the Imperial War Museum research room, where I read numerous letters and accounts from real RFC pilots and learnt the terrible cost of war for those men and their families. Their experiences were heart-breaking and described with such honesty and courage.

Andy Johnson, for his expertise on WW1 airfields in Lincolnshire.

David Harrigan MBE, Outreach & Learning Officer, Aviation Heritage Lincolnshire, for informing me about Shuttleworth as well as lots of info on Lincolnshire aviation.

Jenny Ashcroft, novelist, for sending me pictures of Remy Siding, where Papa was taken to a Canadian Casualty Clearing Station in 1917.

Iona Grey, novelist, for sending excellent books on WW1 aviation and women in WW1.

Russ Drewery, for an invaluable afternoon patiently explaining to me how kites and wings work, as well as allowing Poppy and I to watch him kite surfing on Cleethorpes beach and see close up how the great kite takes to the air.

WW1 online forums and their members: the Great War Forum contributors & Alan Greveson’s WW1 Forum, for helping find out information on Papa’s movements.

The Grimsby library local history section for help on Edwardian Cleethorpes & the staff of the Cleethorpes Chronicle, including Samantha Blake and also local history expert Alan Dowling, for information on Cleethorpes dialect.

Mexborough and District Heritage Society, for information on the 1909/10 Doncaster Air Shows.

Diana Britten and her daughter Sophie Biggs. Diana is a champion aerobatic pilot and shared her thoughts in two long interviews on being a competitive pilot and also how it is to be a woman in a pursuit largely peopled by men. Her comments on learning to fly and the joy of flying in particular were hugely influential on the writing of this novel. Sophie gave me a fascinating insight into what it’s like to live with someone who is mad about flying! Thanks also to dear Suzie Dooré, for remembering the connection and making the introduction, as well as commissioning this story in the first place.

Ian Kingsnorth, Trustee (retired) & Volunteer with Life Membership & Tracy Fern, Retail Sales and Visitor Co-ordinator, from the South Yorkshire Aviation Museum, for excellent help regarding the 1910 Doncaster Air Show and the Burton-upon-Trent aviation meeting, including the sharing of contemporary newspaper articles and photographs.

Dr Mark White PhD, FHEA, Senior Lecturer, Department of Engineering Dynamics at the University of Liverpool and Dr Philip Perfect, Modelling and Simulation Engineer, for kindly giving of their time and letting me loose on their beautiful flight simulator, where Rob Millinship taught me how to fly a Bristol Boxkite. Thanks, guys, for not laughing too loudly when I smashed up your Antoinette.

Philip Jarrett, aviation historian and author, for informative and useful help with WW1 training aircraft and other aircraft matters.

Jean Fullerton, author, for such helpful information on Edwardian midwives.

Dr Tim Bruning, Dr Himanshu Gupta, Nurse Paula Donald & Jim Airey, physiotherapist, for healthcare above and beyond the call of duty during the writing of this book. Also, much love and gratitude to Pauline Lancaster, Kerry Drewery, Adele Webster and Fran Jaines, as well as Marie & Kevin Porter, for help at that time with the best of childcare.

Allan Kendall and Kathy Kendall for exceptional help on the history of their home town Saskatoon, Saskatchewan and other information on Canadian aviation and horses.

Andrew King, pilot, for invaluable information on the JN-4 Canuck, how it flies and how to look after it in the harsh Saskatchewan winters.

Early readers of this novel, for their helpful comments and support: Simon Porter, Lynn Downing, Pauline Lancaster, Louisa Treger, Vanessa Lafaye, Teresa Rouse, Ann Schlee, Sue White and Kathy Kendall.

All my writer friends in the Prime Writers and the Historical Writers’ Association, as well as my longest-serving writing friend, Kerry Drewery. You guys give me courage and keep me smiling every day.

My new friends and colleagues teaching English so brilliantly at the Grimsby Institute and to the amazing kids we teach – I salute you all! You keep me on my toes, inspire me and make me laugh.

Francine Toon, my editor at Hodder, for always being a champion of my books, including this one. And to everyone at Hodder, including Claudette Morris, Jenny Campbell, Susan Spratt and the amazing designers who keep on producing such stunning and beautiful book covers.

Also, a huge thank you to the brilliant copyedit and proofreading team at Hodder, who were eagle-eyed and invaluable as ever and to the publicity team for all their efforts.

Jane Conway-Gordon, for her support and belief, advice and help and always reading so extraordinarily quickly! Thank you, Jane, for everything, for all these years. Much love and gratitude to you.

Laura Macdougall, my agent at Tibor Jones, for brilliant editing and negotiating skills, for her vision and energy, and for coming to Cleethorpes and strolling on the beach talking about The West Wing.

To my own dear Mam and to Russell, for love, belief, strength and, oh, everything. Same goes to Dad and Anna, to my lovely brothers & their wives, my nephews and niece, my aunties and uncles, my cousins and second cousins for never-ending support and love.

Lastly, to Poppy, my pride and joy, my champion, my buddy, my inspiration, my cleverest pal, my dearest girl. What will you do with your beautiful life, my darling? Whatever you choose, I know your spirit will take to the skies and become a bird.

In my historical novels, I do my best to base everything I can on the facts of the time, while also allowing my stories to take a flight of fancy. In my previous novels, I’ve found that some readers have enjoyed hearing about the historical basis of my heroines’ exploits, so to that end, here is some information about the background to this novel set in the early days of powered flight.

Kitty Hawk

Betty Perry, Della’s great-aunt, comes home to Cleethorpes, having lived in Kitty Hawk. When analysing data about the inhabitants of this tiny place that was to become world famous because two brothers from Ohio happened to visit and fly their machines there, I discovered one immigrant from England who lived in Kitty Hawk at that time, a woman, about whom I could find no more details than that. But she intrigued me and gave me the narrative permission to place Auntie Betty there for a few years, married to her beloved Truman.

Cleethorpes in the Edwardian era and during WW1

All of the streets and other locations mentioned in the novel are real Cleethorpes places that existed during the period, and many are still around now – including the pier, which looks virtually identical. I took a liberty with the manager of the Dolly, or the Dolphin Hotel, who is my own invention but the Dolly was indeed there and its building still stands near the seafront today.

Female aviators of the Edwardian era

Every time I start researching about women in history, I always find the most extraordinary stories of women who circumvented the restrictions of their time and lived lives of adventure and exploration that defy expectations. Most of these women are almost completely lost to history and remain unsung. I’ve chosen to create my own main character for this novel, but her experiences and ambitions are typical of many an aviatrix I read about.

Firstly, the real-life aviatrixes who have a cameo appearance:

Hélène Dutrieu – this Belgian aviatrix known as the ‘Girl Hawk’ was the first woman in her country to earn her pilot’s licence. She was a champion cyclist, stuntwoman and all-round speed freak before becoming an aviatrix. During the war, she became an ambulance driver and director of a military hospital.

Hilda Hewlett – as Dud reports, the first British woman to gain her pilot’s licence, she also opened the first flying school in England. She became a highly successful aircraft manufacturer and businesswoman.

Melli Beese – an extraordinary woman, the first female German to get her licence, she was a pilot and aircraft designer with her husband, just as she is in this story. However, the Great War did for both of them and their story ends in tragedy. Imprisoned as an alien and as wife to an alien, both Melli and her husband grew ill and weak throughout the awful years of WW1-era Germany. Their business was also taken by the government, so that after the war they were penniless. They later separated and Melli killed herself. A terrible end for a brave, heroic young woman who was beaten by the system. But history bears witness to her glorious career and her role as a pioneer in women’s aviation. (By the way, I couldn’t find out if Melli was a fluent English speaker, but I needed her to speak English in order to help Della, so I hope the reader will forgive this potentially fictional skill to serve the narrative.)

Other aviatrixes of the period:

Lilian Bland – an Anglo-Irish journalist who designed and built her own aeroplane from scratch. It didn’t fly far but it’s the effort that counts. A pioneer of aviatrixes and female aircraft designers, she deserves her place in aviation history. Betty’s plans to design and build their own aeroplane and fly it from Cleethorpes beach finds its inspiration in figures like Bland.

Katherine Stinson – an American aviatrix, who was known as the ‘Flying Schoolgirl’ (you see, it’s not only Meggie Magpie who was given a daft epithet). She was a flying instructor and the first woman to perform a loop. Amongst other feats, such as being one of the first women to carry airmail, as well as night flights and skywriting, she toured China and Japan giving demonstrations of her aeroplane, an extraordinary accomplishment in any time, for woman or man.

Marie Marvingt – a French aviatrix who disguised herself as a man and fought on the front lines for a while until she was discovered. Then, while serving as a nurse in 1915, a tale is told that she treated a pilot patient who was upset because he was going to let down his crew on a mission that day. The story goes that she took his place and flew several missions over German-occupied territory. She was later awarded the Croix de Guerre.

There are other stories, some real, some perhaps apocryphal, of unofficial aviatrixes flying in France, Italy, Germany and Russia during WW1. Women pilots were refused in their bid to join the air forces of many countries, including Britain. We’ll never know what effects there may have been on the lives of the men in the trenches below if those women had been allowed to fly for the RFC above them, but it could only have helped. What a waste. (It’s worth noting that WW1 has often been characterised as a period of emancipation for women, where many took over the roles of the men who had gone off to fight. What we sometimes forget is that after the war, pre-war chauvinism towards women and work returned and some of that hard-won progress was set back. A good example is to be found in the fact that women became train drivers during WW1 and yet post-war, the first woman to become a train driver in this country again did not come along until the 1970s. (See Kate Adie’s Fighting on the Home Front: The Legacy of Women in World War One for this nugget of information, including many more.)

Above, I’ve listed just a handful of the many pioneering women who learned to fly during the Edwardian and Great War era, most of whom are long forgotten now. Mention female pilots and if anyone has anything to say it’s usually about Amelia Earhart or Amy Johnson, about whom Hollywood movies were made and countless books written. And those women certainly were fabulous figures in the history of flying females. However, they were flying in the wake of earlier heroines, many of whom died in their pursuit of flight, yet laid the foundation for women everywhere to think, If she can do it, so can I.

Please see the book on the history of the aviatrix, Before Amelia: Women Pilots in the Early Days of Aviation by Eileen F. Lebow, which was extremely helpful in understanding the challenges women faced in these difficult times.

Edwardian & WW1-era aeroplanes

I have the Shuttleworth Collection and everyone associated with it to thank for much of the factual detail about aeroplanes to be found in this novel. This extraordinary collection of aircraft from the earliest days of flight, situated at Old Warden in Bedfordshire, is well worth a visit, especially on one of their marvellous airshow days. The depth of knowledge and expertise housed in this place is phenomenal. Through this marvellous place I also made contact with vintage aircraft experts and pilots Robert Millinship and Roger ‘Dodge’ Bailey, who contributed hugely to the factual basis of all the flying sequences in this story (see Acknowledgements). And yes, pilots really didn’t wear seatbelts in most early planes. Unbelievable but true!

Blackburn aeroplanes

Thanks to ‘Dodge’ Bailey for his expert help on Blackburns in particular. As both he and Rob Millinship told me, those who can fly the early planes are the best pilots, as modern planes are designed to almost fly themselves, whereas you have to fight to control the early planes as they’re full of imbalance and instability. Dodge explained that the Blackburn was extraordinary for its day and in fact would pass the test of stability in all three axes now, whilst most planes up until WW2 would not have passed that test. The Blackburn would have back in 1912 – an extraordinary accomplishment for such an early plane and in my opinion Robert Blackburn should be far more famous and well-remembered than he is, for this achievement.

Some readers may question the likelihood of flying the Blackburn across the Channel in 1918, with enough fuel and oil to get there and back. To them and all doubters of extraordinary feats in any of my novels, I quote verbatim Dodge’s marvellous pronouncement upon the topic, proving once and for all why a novelist like me needs experts like Dodge:

To answer your question I’m going to assume that the aircraft is fitted with the same engine as our Blackburn, i.e. 50 HP Gnome, and that the fuel and oil tanks have the same capacities, namely 12 gal fuel and 4.5 gal oil. Fuel weighs 7.2lb per gal and castor oil weighs 9.5lb per gal. The Specific Fuel Consumption for the Gnome is about 0.6lb/HP/hr and the Specific Oil Consumption is about 0.12lb/HP/hr, therefore the engine will consume fuel at about 4.2 gal per hour and oil at about 0.83 gal per hour. The tank capacities would allow for 2¾ hours’ flying from the fuel but the oil tank should last nearly 6 hours. So this would allow the aircraft to fly safely for say 2 hours or about 100 miles in no wind. On landing there should be nearly 4 hours’ worth of oil remaining. So, if the fuel tank is refilled, it should be possible to make another 2 hour flight without having to top up the oil tank. So full fuel (12 gal) would weigh 86lb and full oil would weigh about 43lb making 129lb altogether. Now 129lb is 9 stone – the weight of a light passenger. Therefore if no passenger was carried, 12 gal of fuel and 4.5 gal of oil could be carried in the passenger seat and used to top up the tanks.

Claude Grahame-White and other pilots

A major personality of early aviation, Claude Grahame-White is rightly revered for his place in the history of flying. So, this is what’s true and what isn’t about Claude Grahame-White in this book: he was very good-looking – just look at any photograph! And he was married to a wealthy socialite. He was instrumental in the creation and development of Hendon and the art of flying: just read his book Learning to Fly to hear his expert voice and demonstrate his love for flight.

But his dialogue, personality and of course Della’s imaginings about him that are presented in this novel are pure fiction. In aviation history, one could say that Claude was not particularly an advocate of women pilots. His school at Hendon did offer training to a few women – and in that respect they differed from some other contemporaries who refused to teach women at all – but he did make pronouncements from time to time on women’s natural unfitness for flying. In this respect though one must view him as a man of his time, with typical views of his era. He was such an interesting character, I really wanted Della to meet him – and when she did, and saw what a handsome devil he was, and found herself shoved up against him on the narrow seat of the Bristol Boxkite, she promptly fell for him, much to my disapproval. Well, what can you do with characters? They will up and do their own thing. So, I hope the reader will forgive me for allowing Claude to improve somewhat his rather shabby record towards women in aviation, my only excuse being that perhaps if he’d met Della Dobbs in real life and seen her fly as brilliantly as she did, he might well have changed his opinion slightly, just as he does in this novel. And whatever one might say about his attitudes towards women, there’s no doubt that he was a true hero of early aviation and I have tremendous respect for him. I used his excellent book Learning to Fly, published in 1913, to gain insight into the man and his love for flying.

Other pilot cameos played in this novel include B.C. Hucks and Hubert Oxley, amongst others. I’ve based these representations on the few facts I could glean from contemporary accounts about their appearance and demeanour, but mostly they are from my own imagination.

Aviators’ Certificates

Della’s pilot’s licence is gained on the 25th day of May 1913, on a Grahame-White biplane, at the Grahame-White School, Hendon, Aviator’s Certificate 492. The real pilot to be given the certificate of that exact number was Lieut. Paul Augustine Broder (5th Worcestershire Regt.) on a Bristol biplane of the Bristol School at Brooklands. See the wonderful Grace’s Guide online for details but I needed a date around that time and his fitted the bill, so I’m hoping he would forgive me for pilfering his for Della.

Electric lights on an aeroplane

As seen in Della’s flight over Cleethorpes, electric lights really were used at a night flight airshow at Hendon during this era, in case you were wondering.

The Grimsby Chums

These soldiers were part of the ill-fated idea of local men joining up together, training together, shipping out together and ultimately dying together. The so-called ‘pals’ regiments, formed up and down the country in the early years of the war, condemned many villages and small towns to the most devastating kind of loss. The Chums were no exception and Puck’s fate was tragically typical of this brave bunch of Grimsby lads.

Despatch riders

Della speeding her motorcycle around London during the war was based on the experiences of despatch riders such as Mairi Chisholm who worked for the Women’s Emergency Corps. Mairi went much further, to become an ambulance driver in war-torn Belgium. As ever, my fictional characters’ experiences pale beside the true heroism of real people in extraordinary times.

Puck’s letters

Some readers may be surprised to read the honesty of Puck’s letters in terms of conditions in the trenches and his feelings about what’s happening to him. I direct you to the real letters themselves, published in a range of books about the period and many unpublished found in the Imperial War Museum, for examples of searing honesty that escaped the censor. Some soldiers kept quiet during the war itself and for the rest of their lives. Others did not, and some of those wrote in astonishing detail about the horror they’d witnessed as well as their disgust and misery for what they were experiencing in the trenches.

Please see the compilation of real WW1 soldiers’ correspondence, ‘Letters from the Trenches’, ed. Jacqueline Wadsworth, for an eye-opening range of words from the men themselves.

Dudley Willow

In many ways, Dud Willow is his own person. He stepped out of my plans and strolled along Cleethorpes beach fully formed. In other ways, Dud is based on some aspects of my lovely Papa, my grandfather who fought in the First World War and lived to have a son who was my father. My Papa was tall and willowy, was gentle and kind, had a quiet smile on his face whenever you saw him and was also a radio ham. Once, a couple of years before Papa died, I had to do some school homework on WW1 and I telephoned him to ask about his experiences. He barely told me a thing and I remember hanging up feeling frustrated but also humbled by his voice, small and quiet on the telephone line, a man born in the nineteenth century, who spoke from another age. Years later, I found a fascinating box of photographs and documents relating to Papa’s service, which set me off to discover more about his path through the Great War. Through archives and online forums, books and records, as well as the wealth of material in that beloved box, I found that Papa studied textiles in Bradford, trained at the Leeds OTC, left for Clipstone Camp, joined the 4th (R) King’s Own Yorkshire Light Infantry, then the 8th KOYLI. There the similarities between Papa and Dudley end, as Papa didn’t go on to become a pilot. Instead, he was lucky enough firstly to contract influenza and be shipped home in January 1917 and secondly to survive the deadly flu and spend the rest of the war at the Northern Command Depot. If he hadn’t, of course, I’d most likely not be here writing this about him today.

Weelsby Old Hall

There was a convalescent hospital here during the war, where recovering soldiers wore the blue uniforms and escaped the trenches for a while. Nearby Weelsby Woods, where Della and Dud take their walks, is still there today and provides a woodland oasis in the centre of the busy town of Grimsby.

Royal Flying Corps

I based Dud’s experiences on the records of 60 Squadron, in particular to give some details of what happened from September 1917 when Dud is there. However, I have fictionalised his comrades’ names in order to give me freedom over Dud’s movements and sorties. I used other RFC published memoirs as well as visiting the Research Room at the Imperial War Museum. There I read a wide range of unpublished letters from RFC pilots sent during the war and other unpublished RFC documents, such as diaries written during the war and memoirs written after the war was over. Dud’s letters are faithfully based on the letters of these men, most of whom died in the skies over France and Flanders.

Dropping spies over the lines

This is all true about RFC pilots doing spy drops and did happen regularly. Famous pilot Albert Ball did it many times and some of his spies refused to get out of the plane after he’d risked his life getting them there (see the excellent book on the RFC, No Empty Chairs by Ian Mackersey). As for RFC pilots on the run and getting home, see the extraordinary story of Claude Alward Ridley, on whose experience of landing across the lines and being helped by locals to evade capture the early part of Dud’s experiences is based. Their paths diverge when Dud meets up with his saviour Della, but Ridley’s real-life exploits went on through Europe, where he escaped back to England and freedom, entirely without speaking a word of French and helped by every local he asked. Hilda Hewlett – a real aviatrix and aircraft maker who appears as a character in the novel – had a pilot son who went missing in France and was mourned as missing in action, who then returned to England after having been rescued by a Dutch trawler, surprising and delighting all who’d thought they’d lost him. Truth, fiction and strangeness. It never ceases to amaze me.

Canada

Della’s pioneering role in Canadian airmail is a bit early, as the first airmail service here didn’t begin till a bit later in the 1920s, but if Della had been there, I suspect she’d have hurried things along in her trusty Jenny.

Flight today

In writing about an aviatrix, I intended to create the whole story through research and imagination, as writers are wont to do. Having met Rob Millinship early on in the research process, who told me that I really ought to go flying if I was going to write about it, I said Maybe … but never actually intended to go through with it, terrified as I was at the thought. I put it off and put it off for about eighteen months, until one sunny perfect Good Friday I thought, Oh stuff it, and went down to Leicester for my first flight in a light aircraft. Della’s first flight is entirely based on that experience and how glad I am now that I finally did it. I thought I knew about flight, because I’d read about it and interviewed pilots and watched videos. But I didn’t know about it, not really, not from the inside out. Only doing the damned thing can give you that. It was fear and freedom all at once and it was bloody marvellous. Thank you again to Rob for that amazing day and for giving Della’s flights the texture of truth. I know the book is immeasurably better for it.

In interviewing Diana Britten, a champion aerobatic aviatrix, I found that the position of women in aviation had in some ways improved since Della’s time, but I was surprised to find that in other ways little progress had been made. There are still relatively few women airline pilots. I was shocked to read of an interview with an airline pilot from only a couple of years ago who had passengers refuse to fly on her aircraft when they discovered their pilot was a woman. Della would be so disappointed to find that a hundred years of progress had come to this. I can only hope that young women are not put off by such stories and instead see them as a challenge to overcome. Let us hope that as time goes on, more and more women are encouraged to make the sky their home, as Della did.

As Dud says, flight is preposterous. It just doesn’t really seem possible, when you think about it (especially bumble bees and jumbo jets). Today we are still learning about flight and, in particular, how birds and insects do it so effortlessly. To date in 2017, it was only recently that researchers finally proved exactly why and how migratory birds fly in V formations. It’s all to do with upwash and how each bird’s position in a V maximises lift. Birds worked this out themselves, the clever things, whereas we had to think our way into the air, as Auntie Betty tells Della. I take my hat off to those early pioneers of flight, both women and men, many of whom diced with death to drive flight forwards, and many of whom died trying. As war overtook aviation, many pilots from different nations became guinea pigs in the rapid development of aircraft and paid for this with their lives. Throughout the history of aviation, from gliders to space shuttles, many women and men have died in our pursuit of this glorious dance with the wind. This story is a celebration of their bravery and spirit.

Auntie Betty arrived in the first week of 1909, a cold, crackle-foot day when the sea was sorely vexed with the l