We’d love to see your Halloween costumes! This one, featured on Because of Them We Can by Eunique Jones, stole our hearts. Baby Lake is dressed as exchange alumna Dr. Mae Jemison, the first African-American woman to travel to space. Her mom is dressed as Bessie Coleman, the first African-American female pilot.
Photo by: April Belle Photos
Sept. 14, 1935: In California to instruct the actress June Travis in the basics of aviation in preparation for her upcoming role in the film, “Ceiling Zero,” Amelia Earhart conducted a repair seminar before a gaggle of fascinated boys and girls. The film was an adaption of a play by Frank Wead, and, as reviewed in The Times, Hollywood “has taken what was essentially a brittle piece of good theatre and has converted it into a rugged and virile photoplay which is not merely the crackling account of some dramatic incidents in the lives of a few men and women, but, in a very real sense, the record of a page torn from the swiftly moving history of aviation.” Photo: The New York Times
So somebody tweeted a picture of a pretty badass looking Chinese air display team, and within minutes Twitter’s vibrant trolling community collectively lost its sh*t, in the mistaken belief that Hollywood has remade Top Gun with an all-female cast…
Jamaican Women’s Auxiliary Air Force (WAAF) volunteers dressed in their ‘English’ coats leave The Colonial Centre in Russell Square, London 17th February 1943.
The Ministry of Information described the Colonial Centre as “ a London residential club for men from all over the British Colonial Empire, is housed in an old Georgian mansion overlooking Russell Square. Here a man can get a bed for 2/- a night, a good three course meal, in a restaurant to which he can invite his friends, for 1/9. Opened by the Duchess of Gloucester on March 9th, 1943, the club has already become headquarters of much of the social life of the students, war workers and men in the forces who live, or spend their leaves in London.”
Source: Imperial War Museum (PLP 3836D)
Nichelle Nichols “Lt. Uhura” flies aboard SOFIA
Nichelle Nichols recently flew on board NASA’s Stratospheric Observatory for Infrared Astronomy, SOFIA, the world’s largest airborne observatory. Ms. Nichols has been collaborating with NASA for years, actively recruiting into the astronaut corps and into STEM careers. In the 1980s, she flew on SOFIA’s predecessor, the Kuiper Airborne Observatory.
During her flight, Ms. Nichols recorded this short message highlighting the important research NASA is doing to further humankind’s exploration of the solar system and beyond. Learn more by visiting: www.nasa.gov/solarsystem/
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“Hi, I”m Nichelle Nichols, I played Lieutenant Uhura - Chief Communications Officer aboard the Starship Enterprise on Star Trek The Original Series. Today I’m aboard SOFIA, a NASA aircraft flying into a stratosphere with an infrared telescope to observe light coming from interstellar objects. SOFIA helps astronomers learn more about the birth of stars, formations of planetary systems, black holes and more..
SOFIA reminds of the starship Enterprise - it goes ‘Where no man or woman has ever gone before’
Live long and prosper”
‘are all pilots gay?’ I hear you ask wonderingly in the wake of The Force Awakens. and yes, yes they are. your loving and benevolent uncle Jack, armed with multiple degrees in aviation history, is here with some long-awaited pop culture context.
what you have to understand is that since the invention of flight, pilots have actually been closely associated with ‘alternatives’ to dominant cultural gender roles, which has often landed them (ba dum tish) close to gay culture. over the years, flying’s maintained the connotations of same-sex communities, getting away from mainstream society, flamboyance, etc. here are a few landmark examples:
In 1936, at the age of 21 years old, Sarla Thakral became the first Indian woman to earn an aviation pilot license and fly an aircraft, traveling over one-thousand miles in a Gypsy Moth owned by the Lahore Flying Club.
Thakral’s plans to obtain a commercial pilot license were derailed in 1939, when World War II broke out and civil training was suspended. That same year, her husband died in a plane crash, and she abandoned her dream of becoming a commercial pilot.
In the next stage of her life, Thakral earned a diploma from the Mayo School of Arts, moving on to become a successful painter and fashion designer. She remained active and engaged in her work into her later years, stating in a 2007 interview, “Every morning I wake up and chart out my plans. If there is plenty of
work, I feel very happy. Otherwise, I feel a precious day has been wasted.”
II. Men With Blackwater Die
V. He Was a Good Lion
XVII. I May Have To Shoot Him
XXIV. The Sea Will Take Small Pride
My favorite chapter titles from Beryl Markham’s memoir West With the Night, which is gorgeous and funny and fully recommended.
“…like watching a beautiful golden lioness when she walked across the room.”
Beryl Markham, b. 1902 – a glamorous, 6-foot-tall racehorse trainer, professional pilot, writer, and “noted non-conformist.” Raised in Kenya, where she grew up spear hunting and speaking Swahili, Nandi, and Masai, Beryl could not be tied down and went around blazing trails and breaking hearts the world over, including that of the English Prince Henry (romantically), and Ernest Hemingway (professionally), who, after reading her memoir of her solo cross-Atlantic flight, West With the Night, literally wrote to a friend: “She has written so well, and marvelously well, that I was completely ashamed of myself as a writer.”
“You’d likely see that the bulk of the terrain you were about to fly over was bluntly marked ‘UNSURVEYED,’” she once wrote. That could also be about your life, Beryl.
More info about my new fave at Atlas Obscura, as part of their series on female explorers.
