The morning of 16 April 1912 was perfect — or so it seemed. Harriet Quimby stood at Folkestone, England, in her trademark plum-coloured flying suit, preparing to become the first woman to fly the English Channel. There was one problem. Fog had rolled in over the Strait of Dover. Her mechanics advised against going. Quimby climbed into her Blériot XI anyway.

She had been a drama critic and journalist before she was a pilot. Quimby discovered aviation in 1910 at the Belmont Park air meet on Long Island, where she watched the great pilots of the era and immediately decided she would become one of them. She took lessons at the Moisant Aviation School, passing her flight test at 4:30 AM on a foggy morning — the examiners preferred early hours to avoid wind. She passed on her second attempt — her first try, the day before, had ended in failure. On 2 August 1911, she became the first woman in America to earn a pilot's licence.

Her Channel crossing was meant to be a sensation. She had kept it secret from the press, travelling to England under a false name to avoid competition. But the day she lifted off from Folkestone, the newspapers were full of something else: the RMS Titanic had sunk four days earlier. Her historic crossing — in fog, using only a compass and a watch, with no landmarks visible for most of the 22-mile flight — was buried on inside pages.

A Life Cut Impossibly Short

She landed on a beach near Hardelot, France, 59 minutes after taking off. She had done it — the first woman to fly the Channel. She expected a hero's welcome. What she got was a shrug from a world still in shock over the Titanic. It was an injustice history has slowly been correcting.

Two months later, on 1 July 1912, Quimby was flying in the Harvard-Boston Air Meet. During a return flight from Boston Light in a new Blériot monoplane, the aircraft inexplicably pitched forward. Both Quimby and her passenger — an event organiser named William Willard — were thrown from the aircraft. They had no seat belts. Neither survived the fall into the shallow waters of Dorchester Bay. Quimby was 37 years old.

Quimby flew for barely 14 months between earning her licence and dying in Dorchester Bay. In that time she flew across the English Channel in fog, wrote dozens of articles about aviation for Leslie's Illustrated Weekly, and inspired a generation of women who would follow her into the sky. She appeared on a US postage stamp in 1991. Her famous plum flying suit was lost — stolen after her death, before her mother could donate it to the Smithsonian. And every woman who has flown a commercial aircraft since owes something to the drama critic from Michigan who decided, in 1910, that the sky was no place to be excluded from.