Discovering Stories of the Women Who Blazed a Trail for Us
One of our favorite parts of this work is hunting for and bumping into the women who came before us—the ones who built, flew, fixed, painted, and documented airplanes long before anyone was putting “you belong here” on a hangar door. Recently we stumbled upon Anna Airy’s 1918 painting, An Aircraft Assembly Shop, Hendon, a six-by-seven-foot window into a wartime factory where women in yellow blouses lean over workbenches, assembling DH9 bombers. Airy herself was the first woman artist commissioned by the British government to document war industries on the home front. Standing in front of her painting feels a lot like standing in our own hangar: women at the benches, tools in hand, completely at home in the work.
That same joy of discovery followed us to Ireland, where we met the story of Lilian Bland. In 1910–1911, Bland didn’t just take flying lessons—she designed, built, and flew her own airplane, the Mayfly, becoming one of the first women in Great Britain and Ireland (and likely the world) to do so. She studied blueprints, experimented with gliders, improvised fuel systems with a whiskey bottle and her aunt’s ear trumpet, and proved her design in the air. Long before there were checklists or hashtags telling girls to go for it, Lilian Bland simply did the work.
On her drive home from our hangar, one of our Eastern New England Ninety-Nines sisters stopped at Hildene and stumbled onto the story of Mary “Peggy” Lincoln Beckwith, Abraham Lincoln’s great-granddaughter and a true Vermont aviation pioneer. In the early 1930s, Peggy carved her own grass strip into the hillside in Manchester, built a hangar, and flew her open-cockpit Fleet biplane over parades and mountains, remembered locally as “the Amelia Earhart of Manchester.”
Not far away in the historical record is Wilma L. Walsh of East Rupert—described in a 1929 clipping as “small, but with big ambitions,” and celebrated as Vermont’s only woman flyer. A schoolteacher with her sights set on endurance records, she stands in the photo grinning in leather and goggles beside her ship, absolutely at home.
These stories, alongside trailblazers like Anna Airy and Lilian Bland, stitch a powerful lineage from factory floors and farm fields to our pink hangar doors. From Peggy’s private strip to Wilma’s determined smile, from Ireland’s Mayfly to Vermont’s Modern Rosies, we’re reminded that the sky has never truly been a boys-only space—it’s just that some of our foremothers were left out of the headlines. We’re here to say their names, share their stories, and make sure the next generation knows they’re part of this long line of badass builders and flyers.
