Farrier Aviation

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Instrument flight training with Dave Jungling yesterday. Beautiful day on the Oregon Coast!

Big celebration of Alison's achievement tonight at CAP. Congratulations Bullet!

Alison Harding passed her Private Pilot Checkride tonight with flying colors! Congratulations Bullet!

Beautiful weekend on the Oregon Coast... Perfect..

Merry Christmas to all and wishing you a Happy New Year!

As her tiny plane climbed into the air beginning her around-the-world attempt, Jerrie Mock heard the tower controller say over the radio: "Well, I guess that's the last we'll hear from her." The dismissive words of that Columbus, Ohio air traffic controller on March 19, 1964 captured what many thought: a 38-year-old housewife with only 750 hours of flight time had no business attempting what had killed the great Amelia Earhart.

While Amelia Earhart's name is instantly recognizable for her tragic attempt to circumnavigate the globe, few people know the name of the woman who actually succeeded in becoming the first female pilot to fly solo around the world.

Born on this day in 1925, Geraldine "Jerrie" Mock completed her journey in a Cessna 180 single-engine monoplane on April 17, 1964, accomplishing 27 years later what Earhart had set out to do. Nicknamed "the flying housewife" by the press at the time, Mock's name is largely unknown today despite her groundbreaking achievement.

In an interview before her death, the Ohio native said, "I did not conform to what girls did. What the girls did was boring." At age 7, after taking a short airplane ride at a nearby airport, Mock declared she wanted to be a pilot. Several years later, following Amelia Earhart's adventures on the radio, she dreamed of making similar flights. "I wanted to see the world," she remembered. "I wanted to see the oceans and the jungles and the deserts and the people."

She was the only woman in the aeronautical engineering class at Ohio State University, where the male students left her alone after she got the only perfect score on a difficult chemistry exam. But in 1945, women rarely pursued aeronautics careers, and at the age of 20, she dropped out of college to marry Russell Mock. Soon, Mock was busy with her role as wife and mother of three, but she still dreamed of flying. Once her oldest children were in school, she started taking flying lessons and earned her pilot's license. When Mock tired of her ordinary life at home, she complained to her husband about being bored. "Maybe you should get in your plane and just fly around the world," he joked, but Mock decided he was right.

She spent a year preparing for a round-the-world flight, helped by fellow pilots and navigators who thought she was crazy to want to undertake such a dangerous endeavor. Two days before Mock's departure, another woman, Joan Merriam Smith, also set out on a solo round-the-world attempt. The pressure to set the record took some of the joy out of her flight; what she had planned as a leisurely sightseeing trip ended up a grueling marathon made up of 12 or more hours of flying on five hours of sleep.

The journey tested her repeatedly. She accidentally landed at a secret military base in Egypt and was surrounded by armed soldiers, an antenna wire began burning dangerously close to her fuel tank over the Libyan desert, and when she landed in Saudi Arabia, the crowd of men refused to believe a woman had flown the plane alone until someone peered into the cockpit to confirm there was no male pilot.

Even given these challenges, when she touched down in Columbus on April 17, 29 days after that dismissive tower controller had written her off, she was greeted by 5,000 cheering people, Governor James Rhodes, and reporters from across the country. Standing before the crowd, overwhelmed, she announced: "I don't know what to say. This is just wonderful."

Mock never wanted to capitalize on her fame, preferring solitude and quiet: "The kind of person who can sit in an airplane alone is not the type of person who likes to be continually with other people," she explained. After 1969, finances prevented her from ever flying an airplane again. And while she recognized the significance of her flight, achieving the record was not as important as the joy she took in flying. In interviews on her various stops during the flight, she demurely said, "I just wanted to have a little fun in my airplane." Jerrie Mock passed away in 2014 at the age of 88.

Jerrie Mock's extraordinary story is told in the fascinating book "The Jerrie Mock Story" for ages 10 and up at https://www.amightygirl.com/the-jerrie-mock-story

Her memoir, Three-Eight Charlie, is also available for Kindle at http://amzn.to/10lJTBt

For two fun stories starring Mighty Girls who dream of flying - both for ages 4 to 8 - we recommend "Violet the Pilot" (https://www.amightygirl.com/violet-the-pilot) and "Rosie Revere, Engineer" (https://www.amightygirl.com/rosie-revere-engineer)

For an fascinating introduction to 26 female pioneers of flight, we highly recommend "Women Aviators: 26 Stories of Pioneer Flights, Daring Missions, and Record-Setting Journeys," for teen and adult readers, 12 and up, at https://www.amightygirl.com/women-aviators

For more books for both kids and adults about trailblazing female pilots throughout history, visit our blog post, "30 Books About Boundary-Breaking Female Pilots," at https://www.amightygirl.com/blog?p=20960