If you broke the sound barrier, you ate free. That was the standing offer at a bar in the Mojave desert run by a woman who had once held the women’s world air speed record, flown stunts for Howard Hughes, and crossed Mexico on a burro dressed as a man.

Florence Lowe Barnes is remembered mostly as scenery in the Chuck Yeager story. She was considerably more interesting than that.

Aviation was in the family

Her paternal grandfather was Thaddeus Lowe, who ran the Union Army’s balloon corps during the Civil War — effectively the first American military air unit. He took her to an air meet as a child. She then spent two decades doing more or less everything except what a Pasadena heiress was supposed to do.

The nickname came from an escapade in the late 1920s: she signed onto a boat bound for Mexico dressed as a man, and ended up travelling overland by burro. A companion said she looked like Don Quixote’s squire, mangled Sancho Panza into Pancho, and it stuck for the rest of her life.

She started flying in 1928 and was reportedly solo after six hours.

Faster than Earhart

In 1930 she took the women’s world air speed record from Amelia Earhart, flying a Travel Air Type R — the celebrated Mystery Ship racer. The figure usually quoted is 196.19 mph. It is worth noting that while the Smithsonian and the Edwards Air Force Base history office both confirm she took the record from Earhart, neither states that number, so treat the decimal places with a little caution.

What is not in doubt is that she was a genuinely fast pilot at a time when that was the whole point, and that she used it to get work. Manufacturers hired her to demonstrate aircraft, for a reason a Smithsonian curator put plainly.

She flew stunts in Hollywood, including on Howard Hughes’ Hell’s Angels, and then did something more consequential: she organised the stunt pilots into a union, to fix pay and stop directors killing people for a shot.

Il club di equitazione Happy Bottom

In 1935 she bought desert land between two dry lakes, a few miles from what was then Muroc Army Airfield. Over the next six years it became a ranch, a dairy, a hotel, a rodeo ground, a swimming pool, an airstrip and, above all, a bar.

Muroc became Edwards. The men flying the X-planes off the lakebed drank at her place: Yeager, Doolittle, Bob Hoover, Jack Ridley, later Buzz Aldrin. If you went supersonic, dinner was on the house. It was the closest thing the American flight-test programme had to a mess, and it was run by a woman who had been flying since before most of them could drive.

He also, in the same account, called her a damn good pilot and a great friend.

How it ended

The Air Force wanted her land. A new base commander barred enlisted men from the club, and the base pushed an allegation that she was running a brothel — the FBI investigated and found no proof of it. Behind the row was a plan for a very long runway that would have run across her property.

She fought it in court. In 1953, while the case was still running, fire destroyed most of the main buildings. The cause was never established. Arson was suspected and never proven.

She was offered $205,000 and eventually settled for roughly double that, which by the standards of a fight with the United States Air Force is not a defeat. The club was never rebuilt. The runway was never built either.

She died alone in the desert in March 1975. Edwards, which had spent a decade trying to get rid of her, later named a room at the officers’ club after her, and her ashes were scattered over the ruins.

Home-movie footage of Barnes and her Travel Air Mystery Ship:

The trailer for the documentary about her and the club:

And Edwards Air Force Base on its own most difficult neighbour:

Sources: Smithsonian National Air and Space Museum; Edwards Air Force Base Cultural Resources Department; Lauren Kessler, The Happy Bottom Riding Club; the General Chuck Yeager Foundation.