Rating: WORTHY!
Fly Girls details the lives of a handful of early female pilots back when air travel was new, largely experimental, and very dangerous. The story of these people proved to be highly engaging. My only disappointment was the lack of images - it would have been nice had there been a pic of each of the pilots covered in the narrative, but of course that's the price we pay for listening to an audio book! I don't know if the ebook or print book has such images, but pictures can be readily found online of both the pilots and the airplanes.
The book is subtitled "How Five Daring Women Defied All Odds and Made Aviation History," but it never really made it clear who these five were. That picture only emerged slowly over the course of the book. The blurb, which usually the author has nothing to do with, identifies them as Louise Thaden, Ruth Nichols, Amelia Earhart, Ruth Elder, and Florence Klingensmith.
It was paradoxically Earhart, not a great flyer, who got the lion's share of the story and Klingensmith who got so little. The blurb was highly inappropriate, too evidently written by a guy and breathlessly describing Thaden as a studious pilot, mother, and wife, although why 'mother and wife' were in there is a mystery. Have you ever read of a male pilot being described as a 'father and husband"? I haven't. In the same blurb, Ruth Elder is described as "gorgeous." Why? She looked like most other women of the 1920s did! But the question is, was Chuck Yeager or some other male pilot ever described as gorgeous? I don't think so. This is a serious and ongoing problem with Big Publishing™.
Other than that, the only real complaint I'd have was this one section which rambled on endlessly about this guy Cliff Henderson, who was instrumental in setting-up air racing back then when it was a new and exciting thing. Why the author chose to go off at a major tangent with him in particular, I do not know. Many men were mentioned, of course, including some air pioneers with renowned names like Beech, Curtiss, and Fairchild, with a few details given in each case, which is entirely understandable, yet none got the treatment Henderson did. I guess it's hard for some authors to leave all that research unused, but it was annoying and it felt inappropriate and rather insulting to the five women and the other female pilots about whom this book was purportedly written.
Other than that, the writing was good and engaging, although perhaps fanciful here and there, the author claiming to know what these pilots were doing, and thinking and saying when clearly that could not have been the case. In some cases there were diaries and newspaper reports and so on, and books (Amelia Earhart wrote one) which supplied authentic and interesting information, and O'Brien did his research, but I've never been a fan of fictionalized accounts creeping into an otherwise non-fiction book.
One of the most interesting sections (aside from Earhart's cross-Atlantic trip) was the 1929 Women's Air Derby. This was of course re-named the "Powder-Puff Derby" when that jackass, so-called comedian Will Rogers disparaged it as such, and the newsmen got hold of the story. The race was from Santa Monica, California to Cleveland over several days. Despite disparagement from men, out of 20 pilots who began it., only six failed to finish, which is pretty impressive in an era of relatively untrustworthy airplanes and multiple technical issues.
One competitor died when her plane lost an argument with gravity. She apparently had engine trouble and was trying to set down on a flat area close by a river, but ended up crashing. She'd evidently tried to use her parachute, but deployed it so late that it didn't even have time to open before she quite literally hit the ground. Her name was Marvel Crosson.
Amelia Earhart was in that race, but came third. She would have been fourth had Marvel not crashed. The men who organized it put all kinds of obstacles in the way, such as telling the women the airplane had to have horsepower 'appropriate for a woman'. One of the contestants, Opal Kunz, owned and flew a 300-horsepower plane that was disqualified as too fast for a woman to fly, so she was forced to find a weaker one! There were incidents suggestive that maybe some of the women's planes were sabotaged - like when one woman discovered gasoline had been put into her oil tank in place of oil, and so on.
One of the biggest critics was a man named Haliburton - yes that one - who founded the company that Dick Cheney had ties to, and that has a string of issues tied to its name including some during the mid-east conflicts. Haliburton was convinced women didn't ought to be flying at all - that they ought to be home having babies - and probably barefoot and in the kitchen! He likely would have died of apoplexy had he lived until 1993 when Jeannie Leavitt became the first female fighter pilot. She was the one who trained Brie Larsen, the actor, so she could pretend to be a fighter pilot in the Captain Marvel movie. Shades of Marvel Crosson!
This book was sad at the end. Of the five girls the story covers primarily, Amelia Earhart disappeared without a trace, as most people know, but the other four, despite typically accomplishing more than Earhart did, are far less well remembered and most are equally sad.
It's not a spoiler to relate the historical record: Florence Klingensmith died young, in a crash. She demands a movie be made about her life, feisty daredevil that she was. Ruth Nichols almost died in a crash and spent the last few years of her life depressed and in pain from assorted injuries until she committed suicide. Ruth Elder also attempted suicide, but was discovered in time, and she went on to live up to her name, dying at the age of 75. Louise Thaden seemed to be the only one who escaped those problems, perhaps because she had a happy marriage and children, and she died last of all in 1979. As I said, it's a real shame that Earhart is better remembered than any of the others; all of them deserve to be remembered.
Despite its sadness, and despite how angering it is that these women were constantly kept down and demeaned for their gender, I commend this book as a worthy read. It demands to be read. People need to know how far we've come and then maybe they'll better understand how far we still need to go.
