Newsday's 2000 profile of Elinor Smith Sullivan

TWO THOUSAND FEET above Long Island, a teenage girl wrapped both hands around the throttle stick of an open-cockpit biplane and held on with all her strength.

Below her, the lights of Mineola sparkled like diamonds on a jeweler's drape; above her, stars glittered in the moonless sky. But 17-year-old Elinor Smith had no time for scenery-gazing as she struggled desperately to control her plane.

WHAM! A jolt of turbulence tossed the craft as if it were a pebble in a wind tunnel. Jamming the throttle open, Smith regained altitude just as- WHAM!-more turbulence rocked the little plane. It was just before midnight on Jan. 30, 1929. Six months earlier, the Freeport girl had become the youngest person in the nation to earn a pilot's license. Now she was attempting to break the women's solo endurance record.

When she'd taken off from Mitchel Field at 2:17 that afternoon in a Bird biplane, she had planned to stay in the air at least 18 hours, easily topping the current 12-hour record. But it was becoming obvious that she wouldn't last that long. Should she give up and land in defeat? Or try to stay aloft three more hours-to beat the record by the requisite 60 minutes?

The temperature had been dropping rapidly since sundown and was in the single digits. Bitter cold seeped through Smith's custom-made leather flight suit; her fingers, encased in fur-lined gloves, were numb. The chamois mask she wore to prevent frostbite itched unbearably, despite the cold cream her mother had rubbed into her skin before takeoff. And every time Smith exhaled, moisture from her breath fogged her goggles.

Clumsily, she loosened her seat belt, hoping to ease the cramps that wracked her legs after hours of sitting. WHAM! A moment later, turbulence hurled her half out of the cockpit.

Her heart pounding, Smith tightened the belt again-only to discover that the stabilizer bar was stuck in one position. Without it, she wouldn't be able to keep the plane level as fuel burned off and changed the airship's center of gravity. In order to keep the plane's nose up, she'd have to keep both arms wrapped around the stick.

For the next hour, the young pilot flew up and down Sunrise Highway, deciding what to do. She could try to land, but doing so before daybreak presented another problem. Despite Smith's experience as a pilot-she had been taking flying lessons since she was 7 or 8-she had never landed a plane at night, and wasn't sure she'd be able to.

In the days before sophisticated instrumentation, a pilot's ability to land an aircraft depended largely on his or her depth perception, which Smith knew could be seriously impaired in the dark. Couple that with an icy, dimly lit field and an airplane half-full of high-test gasoline, and she was facing a potential disaster.

"If I hit something, I knew what the outcome would be: Kaboom!"

But what choice did she have? She couldn't justify bailing out and letting her plane plummet into someone's house. Should she fly out over the ocean and jump? The thought of plunging into the icy Atlantic was more than she could bear.

Bracing her knees against the stick to keep the plane level, Smith reached for her flare gun and fired it-to let the ground crew know she was coming in.

As Smith circled the field, trying to work up her courage to land, she noticed another aircraft below her. The moon had come out, enabling her to see clearly as the pilot lined up his plane behind two silvery patches of ice. " His movements were so deliberate that I could almost feel him yank the stick as he set down smartly between the two natural markers," she wrote in her 1981 autobiography, "Aviatrix."

The pilot-she later learned it was famed Army flier Jimmy Doolittle, returning from a test flight to Philadelphia-was showing her what to do.

AFRAID TO SO MUCH as blink, she cut the throttle and followed him in, setting her plane easily on the frozen field. "I just sat there for a minute and thanked God I was down," recalled Smith, who was so tired she had to be lifted from the cockpit. "It was the worst flight of my life."

Not to mention one of the most significant. When Smith landed on Mitchel Field at 3:30 a.m. on Jan. 31, 1929, she had been in the air for 13 hours, 16 minutes and 45 seconds.

The 5-foot-3, freckle-faced teenager had just set the first of her many world's records.

Although her name is not nearly as recognizable as that of her friend and fellow flier Amelia Earhart, Smith was considered one of the great pilots of her era. Newsreels of her feats played around the country, and front-page headlines proclaimed her a "youthful air queen," "intrepid birdwoman" and- much to her dismay-"the Flying Flapper."

At 15, she had become the youngest person of her era to make a solo flight; at 19, she was voted best female pilot in the country by her fellow fliers. In 1934, she became the only female aviator ever featured on a Wheaties box.

At the Smithsonian Institution's National Air and Space Museum in Washington, D.C., where Smith's name hangs in the Golden Age of Flight gallery, curator Dorothy Cochrane says Smith deserves far more public recognition than she gets. "She's not a household word, but she probably should be. She did some really significant flying."

Smith knew she was destined to be a pilot almost from the minute she saw her first airplane. She was 6 years old, and she and her younger brother had gone for a Sunday drive near Hicksville with their parents. While motoring along Merrick Road they saw a sign: "Airplane Rides- $ 5 and $ 10."

Parked in a potato field was a contraption that looked as if it had been made from struts, with a bullet-shaped object that turned out to be the cockpit jutting from the front and a propeller affixed to its rear. "To my brother, Joe, and I, it was 'Star Wars,'" Smith recalled.

Her father, vaudeville comedian and dancer Tom Smith, began talking to the pilot. More than eight decades later, his daughter could still remember every detail of what happened next: how her father tied her blond braids together so they wouldn't blow around; how he lifted her and Joe into the cockpit and buckled the seat belt over them, the thrill she felt as the plane lurched across the field and into the sky. And then-the view.

"I could see out over the Atlantic Ocean, I could see the fields, I could even see the Sound," she recalled. "And the clouds on that particular day had just broken open so there were these shafts of light coming down and lighting up this whole landscape in various greens and yellows."

From that moment on, she wanted to fly.

Smith's ambition was inadvertently nurtured by her father, who was passionate about airplanes. After wangling introductions to some of the pilots at Curtiss Field in Mineola, he began spending much of his spare time there, often taking Smith and her brother along.

In those days, the field was a wide dusty plain bordered by three ramshackle metal hangars with leaky roofs. In the dry season, propellers kicked up choking clouds of dust on the dirt runways, and the scent of the varnish used to stiffen fabric fuselages at the plant at the far end of the field permeated everything.

The pilots were a hard-drinking, tough-talking bunch, but they were tickled by the 7-year-old's enthusiasm for flying. She begged them for rides, and usually they complied, letting her take the controls when they saw how much she loved it. By the time she was 10, she was flying regularly, with a pillow behind her back to bring her closer to the controls, and blocks attached to the rudder bar so she could reach it with her feet.

At 13, Smith was flying over the North Shore with famed Curtiss test pilot Bert Acosta when the radiator burst, releasing a cloud of scalding steam. Acosta, in the front of the two-cockpit airplane, couldn't see anything, so the teenager loosened her seat belt and hung out over the side, directing him to an open field where he could land.

Acosta took Smith under his wing and began drilling her on every aspect of airships. "I'm sure you're going to solo in the next couple of years, and I want you to know everything about this airplane before you get into it, so you don't get killed the first time out," he told her.

She desperately wanted to solo, but her father refused to even consider it-at least not until she was 18. But all she could think of was how far away that was-"those three years stretched ahead of me like 30!" So she did the only thing left for her to do: She went to work on her mother.

Although Agnes Smith had mixed feelings about her daughter's love of flying, she understood what it meant to have one's ambitions thwarted by parents who didn't take them seriously: Her own mother had denied her the singing lessons she'd craved to cultivate her beautiful voice.

Not wanting to do the same thing to her own child, Agnes Smith waited until her husband was on the road, then told her daughter to report to a small field in Wantagh, where pilot Russ Holderman kept his plane.

For the next 10 days, Smith bounded out of bed at dawn, pulled on argyle socks, her brother's knickers and an old leather jacket-"My mother wasn't crazy about that getup!"-and headed for Wantagh, where she would spend a half hour with Holderman, practicing takeoffs and landings. Then she'd rush home, change clothes and bike to school, trying to slip quietly into her seat so no one would realize she was late.

Finally, after a practice spin, Holderman hopped out of the cockpit and told Smith, "Take her around. She's all yours."

Momentarily, the 15-year-old panicked. Why had she thought this was such a good idea? What if she crashed? Then her training took over and she opened the throttle, taxied across the field, picked up speed, and became the youngest woman in the world to fly solo.

But her problems weren't over. She still needed a pilot's license-and Orville Wright, chairman of the National Aeronautic Association, wouldn't sign it because he thought she was too young.

Eventually, Holderman managed to arrange a meeting between the father of flight and the young pilot. "I went to Washington, and as it turned out, he thought my parents were exploiting me," Smith recalled. "He had heard they were in the theatrical business and thought they were building me up to play Loews on 34th Street."

Smith managed to persuade Wright this wasn't the case. Not long afterward, on Aug. 14, 1928- just three days before Smith's 17th birthday-he issued her license.

It was around the same time that Smith realized she wanted to become a professional pilot- a radical career choice for anyone back then, especially a woman.

SHE GOT AN unexpected head start when an obscure barnstormer who'd flown in from the Midwest decided a good way to get publicity would be to fly under the Hell's Gate Bridge between Astoria and Wards Island-a stunt anyone familiar with the area would have shunned because of tricky wind currents and turbulence near the water's surface (not to mention the fact that flying under bridges was forbidden in New York City). Sure enough, the barnstormer crashed into one of the stanchions and, although uninjured, wound up with a suspended license.

Unabashed, the man began hanging out at Curtiss Field, bragging about what a wonderful pilot he was and claiming that only engine failure had prevented him from clearing the bridge.

Finally, one of the aerial photographers who worked at the field got irritated. "When are you going to knock it off? Why, even Ellie here could do it!" He turned to Smith. "Couldn't you?"

"Sure," said Smith with a shrug, although she had no intention of trying.

The next thing she knew, the barnstormer was spreading rumors that she'd agreed to duplicate his flight, then chickened out.

"I was furious," recalled Smith, who saw only one recourse: to prove him wrong by flying under the Queensboro, Williamsburg, Manhattan and Brooklyn Bridges, in that order.

She spent the next few weeks checking bridge clearances and tide tables and practicing low-level flying around the masts of boats in Manhasset Bay. On Oct. 21, 1928, she took off from Curtiss Field and headed for the East River.

The next day's New York Daily News told the rest of the story:

"Elinor Smith, Freeport's 17-year-old aviatrix, nonchalantly ducked under four East River bridges yesterday afternoon in a Waco biplane and reported the stunt was easy...'I had to dodge a couple of ships near the bridges, but there was plenty of room,' the high school aviatrix reported."

To this day, Smith is apparently the only person ever to have piloted a regular plane under all the bridges, something she considers a mixed blessing. "The flight only lasted five minutes, yet when people referred to me in the later years, it was invariably as the girl who flew under the four East River bridges," she said in mock dismay.

But Smith couldn't rest on her laurels for long. In March, 1929, Louise Thaden topped her solo endurance record by nine hours. Later that year, Phoebe Omlie became the first woman to fly to an altitude of 25,000 feet. Then there was Earhart, who had set a number of speed records and even had her own publicity manager.

Smith knew the only way to land the contracts she needed to fly professionally would be to drum up her own publicity.

So a month after Thaden broke her women's endurance record, Smith earned it back by staying aloft for 26 hours, 23 minutes and 16 seconds- this time in the comfort of a closed-cabin aircraft. Later that year, she teamed with Bobbi Trout on a two-person endurance flight in California; they set a joint record of 42 hours and became the first women to refuel a plane in midair.

There were other firsts, too: At 18, Smith became the youngest person, male or female, to receive a transport pilot's license. The same year Navy Adm. William Moffett invited her to test one of his training planes in Hampton Bays, making her the first woman to pilot a military aircraft. Moffett was so impressed that he gave her his gold aviator's wings, which she made into a ring: More than 70 years later, she was still wearing it every day.

In 1931, Smith also became the first woman to fly to an altitude of more than 30,000 feet, an achievement that almost ended in disaster when her plane's engine died at 25,000 feet. Trying to restart it, she accidentally cut off her oxygen supply and passed out; the plane plunged 23,000 feet. "When I came to, I was in a power dive right into the Hempstead Reservoir..."

She managed to steer to a landing on a rough patch of ground near Mitchel Field, only to realize there were two trees looming ahead of her. Rather than crash into them and shear off the wings, she cut the ignition, slammed on the brakes and deliberately flipped the ship over, crouching in her seat to protect herself.

"Aviatrix, 18, Saves Self by Keeping Head," the New York World-Telegram headlined the next day (she was actually 19 at the time). The paper added that the first people on the scene found Smith walking around her overturned plane, muttering: "It makes me mad. It makes me mad."

The only damage to the plane was a bent propeller, and three of the ribs on the top wing-"It didn't amount to $ 100," Smith recalled proudly-and so a week later, she went up again, this time setting a new women's altitude record of 34,500 feet.

As she'd hoped, her piloting skills were soon in demand. In 1929, the Irvin Chute Co. hired her as its first woman executive pilot, to demonstrate parachute drops on a nationwide tour; a year later, she became the first woman test pilot for Fairchild Aviation Corp. She did endorsements for goggles and motor oil. And NBC radio hired her as a commentator covering international flights and air races.

But of all the honors Smith received, the one she's most proud of came in 1930, when the American Society for the Promotion of Aviation sponsored a competition for the best male and female pilots in the United States. Only licensed fliers could vote. When the ballots were counted, Smith-who'd assumed Earhart would take the title-was stunned to learn she had won.

"It was such an honor to know that my peers considered me the best," she said, adding that she was even more thrilled when her hero, Jimmy Doolittle, was named the best male pilot.

A year later, however, something happened that would indirectly lead to the end of Smith's flying career. Barely 20, she had gone to Albany to lobby for legislation preventing electric companies from stringing power lines around airports. There, she met with state Aviation Commissioner Patrick Sullivan, an attorney who, Smith was disgusted to learn, "didn't know beans about aviation. Nothing. Zilch!"

"If you're the commissioner, why don't you know anything?" she told him.

Far from being put off, Sullivan, then 23, was intrigued by the feisty blond pilot, so much so that he asked her to dinner.

Two years later they were married.

For several years and two children after that, Smith kept flying. Sullivan was a good sport about his wife's activities, and about being referred to as "Mr. Smith," but he wasn't wild about airplanes. "He flew with me a couple of times, but he said it just wasn't for him, and we left it at that."

One afternoon while pregnant with her third child, Smith was aloft in a balky aircraft. "It just struck me: This is not so smart. I've got two children , and they need a mother more than I need to fly."

SHORTLY AFTERWARD, at the ripe old age of 29, she announced her retirement.

For the next two decades, Smith kept busy raising her son and three daughters on Manhattan's Upper West Side. Still, aviation was never far from her mind. "At the dinner table, it was always like this," recalled Smith's daughter, Patricia Sullivan of Manhattan, banking her hand in the air like an airplane to demonstrate her mother's favorite topic of conversation.

In 1956, Patrick Sullivan died after a long illness, and his widow returned to work, writing and editing articles about aviation. In 1960, the U.S. Air Force Association invited her to speak at Mitchel Field, which led to an invitation to try flying a T-33 jet trainer. "They didn't have to ask me twice. Discovering the delights and differences between jet and propeller flying opened up a whole new world."

Before long, Smith was back in the pilot's seat, flying C-119s as far away as Puerto Rico for a group of World War II pilots who gave paratroop demonstrations. At 55, a bout with cancer forced her to retire again-but not for long. At 60, she was flying with the Naval Reserve in an attempt to save Brooklyn's Floyd Bennett Field, which was threatened by development. The effort was successful, and during the official celebration Smith became the first pilot to set a civilian aircraft on the field.

Now 89, Smith lives in Santa Cruz, Calif. Although her hearing is no longer good enough for her to qualify for a pilot's license, she still flies with her son, a licensed pilot, and has "flown" simulators that the military uses to train pilots. During takeoff in a Navy F-14 simulator, Smith decided to show off her skill with one of the flashy climbing turns that she could always count on to wow crowds at air shows in the late 1920s. The problem was that she didn't realize how much more responsive the F-14 was than the small propeller planes she'd once flown. "I gave it just this much"-she waved her hand to demonstrate the small amount of power she'd used in the simulator-"and suddenly rolled over on my back in the air."

Without missing a beat, Smith rolled the simulated plane right-side up again and kept climbing. The commander who was "flying" with her was awestruck.

"I've never seen anything like that," he told Smith.

"I was dying to say, 'Neither have I'-but I didn't," Smith recalled, laughing.

In March, 2000, she was invited to fly NASA's Challenger simulator, which, she said, "had a console probably the size of the wall."

"You think you have a throttle, but it's more like a toggle switch, and there's almost no lateral control," she said. "You've got to make a perfect landing ... or you crash and burn."

Asked whether she made a perfect landing, Smith laughed. "I managed two- but on a couple of others, they were kind enough to cut the tape."

Much as she enjoyed flying the simulators, however, Smith said that neither they, nor the corresponding aircraft, offer anything like the freedom she once felt in the skies above Long Island.

"It's not that we were such daredevils back then, but there was a rapport between pilot and aircraft that I don't think exists today. You can almost punch in the numbers and fly. You've got flaps, you've got brakes, you've got all the navigational equipment you need, you've got radios."

She paused, reflecting on her early days in the cockpit.

"It was a wonderful, wonderful time," she said wistfully. "I just loved every part of it!"