This month marks the 105th anniversary of a nationally-significant event that took place on Keuka Lake. On September 2, 1910 Blanche Stuart Scott coaxed her Curtiss biplane from the field outside Hammondsport for her first controlled, extended flight. It was the start of a remarkable aviation career, and it was the first flight by a woman pilot in America.

Since Bessica Raiche flew on Long Island also in September of 1910, the date’s been a matter of debate for a hundred years or so, especially since Blanche was not above “improving her lie.” But a radio interview recorded many years later pretty much seals the deal. The interviewer was asking about reports of her making her solo IN AUGUST. This would have been an ideal chance to grab an incontestably early date, on OTHER people’s say-so. But no, Blanche insisted. She HAD gotten into the air a few times previously, on inadvertent “hops,” but didn’t consider those true flights. September 2, she stressed, was the day.

She had already driven cross-country by auto (probably the first woman to do THAT) when she came to the Curtiss Flying School. Glenn was reluctant, not because he opposed women pilots per se, but because he figured that a woman pilot killed in a crash would take the airplane business down with her.

He did agree, but he and Mrs. Curtiss insisted that she board at their house. The company sponsoring her auto tour had touted Scott’s age at 18, and the Curtisses were concerned that she needed someone needed looking after her. She was probably more like 25, and also probably bored to tears spending evenings with Glenn and Lena, but didn’t want to undo her own publicity.

She wasn’t much more than five feet tall, and she rode down to the flying field on a borrowed Curtiss motorcycle. She was so short that she would aim the machine at a wall, cut the engine, coast in, and jump off, letting the motorcycle prop up.

There are stories that Curtiss put governors on her airplane engine so that she couldn’t take off, and one day the governors were “mysteriously” omitted, so that she flew without his permission and forced him to accept her as a full student. The reality is that EVERYONE stared out on underpowered machines, and just about everyone, when the conditions were right, had those inadvertent hops.

By October Curtiss had taken her under contract as an exhibition pilot, though he and Lena remained very protective. She soon went on to other exhibition teams headed by Glenn Martin, Tom Baldwin, and Jimmie Ward. She was a star, sometimes (she said) making $5000 a week (but spent it just as fast). She also said she broke 41 bones.

She quit after a few years, disgusted to be billed as a freak woman flier, rather than a highly-skilled pilot. Supposedly she also overheard a spectator complain because no one had been killed.

She then spent years in movies, radio, and television broadcasting later in life from WLEA in Hornell (she was a Rochester native). Folks I’ve talked to who knew her (she died in 1970) remember her variously – as vivid, vibrant, exciting, crazy, or demanding and imperious. One man remembered her hanging around the Rochester airport in the 1930s, “on the outside looking in.” She was probably all those things. She was also the founder of a line of American woman pilots from Tuth Law and Katherine Stinson through Elinor Smith, Amelia Earhart, Jackie Cochran, and Eileen Collins.

We’re not sure how many times Blanche married, but she never had children (“I can’t even get a pet to obey me,” she said). She summed herself up by saying, “Life has been exciting and interesting. I have lived it my way, and found it good.”