“But you have to be in time to get a shower and get on your bike and ride to school!” her mother would say, according to Sullivan. Only at age 13, with her father performing in Chicago, Smith began taking lessons in Wantagh - driving 45 minutes there without a license - before school. Despite her pleas, her parents wouldn’t allow it. As a girl, Smith desperately wanted to use it for formal training. Her father, also enamored with aviation, bought the small Waco airplane that Smith would fly under the bridges. “She was captivated by the time she was a small child.” “That’s one of the things that’s so special about ,” said journalist and author Theasa Tuohy, 83, who in May published “Flying Jenny,” a fictional work based on Smith’s 1928 bridge flight. “Shafts of sunlight streamed down through broken clouds, turning the drab truck farms below into a fairyland of gilded greens and golds,” Smith recalled of the trip. The whole family boarded the plane, a Farman pusher. While on a Sunday drive through Hicksville with her father and brother, Joe, they spotted a sign alongside an abandoned farm advertising plane rides for $5 and pulled over. Her father, Tom, was a Vaudeville headliner her mother, Agnes, a former singer, became a stay-at-home parent. Smith, the eldest of two children, was born in Freeport, LI, on Aug. “ you’re only as good as your last record - and it’s true.” “She had her moment in the sun, and it didn’t last,” says Dorothy Cochrane, curator for general aviation at the National Air and Space Museum. Though Smith was grounded for 15 days by the Department of Commerce, charged with “freak and stunt flying in congested areas,” this flight would propel her into an illustrious career, one marked by records set in endurance, altitude and speed.īut it would end prematurely, leading to decades of obscurity once Smith’s contemporary Amelia Earhart overshadowed her legacy. When Smith returned to Long Island’s Curtiss Field, she told a Post reporter the feat was “easy.” Sullivan, 80, one of Smith’s three surviving children and a licensed pilot, told The Post. “It’s stunning that on an instant’s notice,” Patrick H. But at the Brooklyn Bridge, a Navy destroyer unexpectedly came into view - reducing her airspace between it and a tanker heading south - forcing Smith to flip the plane sideways to squeeze between them and complete her path. Next came the Williamsburg and Manhattan bridges, without incident. She aimed first for the Queensboro Bridge, where a yacht blocked her preferred entry near Roosevelt Island, making her reroute and glide toward the Queens-side anchorage, where wooden blocks suspended from cables forced her to drop to just 10 feet above the river. “It was a slick piece of flying, requiring expert piloting and technical knowledge,” Smith, who died of kidney failure in 2010 at age 98, recounted in her 1981 memoir, “ Aviatrix.” Elinor Smith in April 1930 Courtesy of Aviation Museum, NY All because a male acquaintance, who tried unsuccessfully to fly under the nearby Hell Gate Bridge, said she couldn’t. 21, 1928, after turning 17, Smith flew a small plane under the Queensboro, Williamsburg, Manhattan and Brooklyn bridges. Just two months after Elinor Smith, at 16, became the youngest licensed pilot, she attempted a stunt no pilot had done before - or since.
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