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Ode to a Legend : The First Woman of Flight

Amelia Earhart may get the book and movie play, but 81-year-old Geraldine Mock has the record.

By: Eric Capper
August/Sept 07 , Page 30

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The First Woman of Flight, pg 2

Her historic flight required 19 stops and was largely a self-planned affair. “I remember when I found out that no woman had ever flown around the world, I didn’t know why they never did,” Mock says. Giving herself just five months to prepare, she took a West-East route that carried her over three continents. She endured icing en route to the Azores, an electrical fire in Libya and a sand storm over the Arabian Desert that caused her engine to sputter above the South China Sea. When she returned to the Port Columbus Airport, after 160 total flight hours, the governor of Ohio and 3,000 fans were waiting for her, not a skeptic left in the bunch. “I was sort of in shock,” she says. “They’d set up a platform and microphones and there were all kinds of people there . . . I hadn’t expected anything like that.”

So why has Mock’s accomplishment languished in relative obscurity when every school kid in America knows of Earhart’s mysterious disappearance? Part of it is that theirs were very different eras in aviation. In Earhart’s time, many people still hadn’t seen an airplane. By Mock’s, man had already orbited the earth.

Mock’s feat also occurred during what today would be called a “busy news cycle.” Present Kennedy had been assassinated just six months earlier, Martin Luther King was marching on Selma and the build-up in Vietnam was underway. Even so, in May 1964 President Johnson cleared his schedule and flew Mock and her family to the White House to present her with the Federal Aviation Agency’s Gold Medal for Exceptional Service. This year Mock received another distinguished honor. On June 16, the 81-year-old retired aviator boarded a private Maule and was flown from her home in Quincy, Florida, to the National Air and Space Museum’s Udvar-Hazy Center in Chantilly, VA, where she watched as Charlie was awarded a spot on the floor beside the Space Shuttle Enterprise, the Gemini VII space capsule and the Enola Gay — a flight into immortality.

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