We’ve all heard of pioneering aviators such as the Wright Brothers, Charles Lindbergh, and Amelia Earhart, but there were also countless others from the earlier days of flight who never quite hit the headlines, and are now only perhaps mentioned in brief passages in old Books quietly accumulating dust in used bookstores.
One such flyer determined to soar boldly where no-one had flown before was New Yorker Kitty Hawksley.
Kitty and her brother Joseph inherited a small fortune after their father Randall Hawksley passed away. Randall had established a teacake empire up and down the eastern seaboard of the United States, and at the time of his passing had accumulated a considerable amount of money.
Whereas Joseph was happy to spend his half of the riches on glamorous dancers, fast cars, and dachshunds, Kitty used the money to fulfil her dreams of flight and thirst for adventure.
In those days, getting a pilot’s licence was an easy thing to do, the hard part was staying in the sky and staying alive after getting the right to do so. After two months of brief flights, near-misses, and several airplanes, Kitty felt confident enough to venture off and set some records.
At the end of the FIrst World War, surplus airplanes were easy to find and cheap to buy, and Hawksley used a string of these to set various records for fastest flights between different states and cities.
Attempting to stick to the ground
Pioneering Aviatrix Kitty Hawksley took a break from her flying escapades in 1921, and attempted to set a new record for the fastest crossing of the United States.
Borrowing an engine from a pranged biplane at her local airfield, she had it installed in a Leyat Helica freshly imported from France. The combination of the powerful aero engine and lightweight vehicle promised unprecedented speeds, and she was favoured to shatter the existing record by a considerable margin.
Unfortunately, within an hour of starting her journey, her vehicle decided that it had much more in common with a plane than a car and took off, soaring to a height of two hundred metres before plummeting to earth. Fortunately the crash landing was broken by a large marquee tent which had been erected in preparation of film star Kenneth Stoat’s wedding.
The record attempt was thwarted, as were the wedding preparations - which resulted in a feud between Stoat and Hawksley which continued for the next two decades.
The following year Hawksley made an attempt on the Land Speed Record, but was foiled when her car became infested with weasels. She decided that she was better suited to aviation and returned to the skies, becoming the first person to fly around Liechtenstein non-stop in 1924.
Across the Himalayas
Artist’s recreation of the events high above the Himalayas. Animal-lovers will be pleased to hear that both the goat and leopard survived the flight.
In 1924, Kitty set out to be the first person to fly over the peak of Trundling-Dee, standing at 8603 meters and the third highiest mountain in the world.
Major Reginald Spoon of the King’s Royal Hussars had led an unsuccessful expedition to make a first summit of the mountain the previous year. The two lead climbers A. V. Larnch and Thomas Wobble had reached a height of 8000m when they ran out of milk for their tea and had to abandon the attempt.
Hawksley carried out preparations at a remote landing strip at the foot of the mountain range and it was while parked there over night that a mountain goat hid in the passenger cockpit in an attempt to evade a snow leopard that was prowling the area.
The next day Hawksley climbed into her biplane, completely unware that she now had a stowaway onboard. While the plane was taxiing for take-off, the leopard reappeared, got wind of the goat in the plane and making a spectacular leap, managed to scramble onboard just as the wheels left the ground.
The leopard continued it’s dogged, or should that be catted?, pursuit of the goat which resulted in a high altitude stand-off worthy of any barnstormer’s display of wing-walking.
Impeded by the extra weight, the biplane was unable to reach altitude, and so Hawksley had to abandon her attempt to fly over the mountain. However, she did, or rather her passengers did, set a record for the highiest altitude achieved by either a goat or a leopard. A record that was to remain unbroken for thirteen years until 1937 when another aviatrix, Betty Boing, took her goat Trevor on a flight across the Alps.
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