Daughter of the sky

by Jr. Paul L. Briand

She begged one after another of the pilots for a ride to see what it was like. Just a take-off and a landing, and she was willing to pay. “Sorry,” they would say. “Regulations absolutely forbid giving civilians any rides.” Certainly not a woman. “Even the general’s wife couldn’t go up,” one of them said. “And she can do just about anything she wants.”

The pilots laughed at the expense of the general’s wife. Amelia, turning away in disappointment, kicked her toe into the packed snow. A plane with skis turned off the ramp and taxied out to the field; the blast from its propeller flung back a sheet of snow that stung Amelia full in the face. She raised her arm against further lashing, and walked away toward the side of a building.

Here, she thought, was a challenge she would like to meet. She watched the pilots put on their big padded helmets and adjust their goggles. The men smeared grease on their faces to prevent freezing in the biting cold of the Canadian sky. Someday she would get her chance to fly in an airplane, and maybe fly one herself. She wanted to be the master of one of those planes and make it obey her will like a horse, a winged horse, and send it roaring through the sky. Amelia was a lone and disconsolate figure as she nurtured her private dreams and left the eager pilots and their planes to their man’s world of flight. She headed back to the city and to woman’s work at the hospital.

AE was still working as a nurse’s aide at the time of the Armistice on November 11, 1918, and at the time of the great Toronto Exposition a few months later.

Amelia and a friend joined the crowds that pressed through the fairgrounds to see the displays and exhibits. AE wanted especially to see a highly advertised added attraction: a demonstration of stunt flying by one of the returned aces of the war.

As the time drew near for the air acrobatics, the two companions settled themselves in the middle of a clearing. Suddenly they heard the plane. Shading their eyes against the afternoon sun, they looked up.

The plane was black against the sky, then red as it turned and the wings and fuselage caught the sun. The little plane twisted and turned and rolled; then it looped and spun down to the right. As the plane swooped down close to the ground, the crowd broke and ran like frightened deer.

The friend grabbed Amelia’s arm; she wanted to get out of the field, fast. Amelia stood her ground. The companion fled for safety.

Nose down and motor roaring, the plane hurtled headlong in a steep dive toward the lone girl in the middle of the clearing.

Amelia gripped her hips, spread her feet and planted them defiantly on the ground. No plane and pilot were going to scare her. She had seen them pull out of dives many times before. Certainly this pilot was no fool, and he seemed to have the plane fully under control.