Act of Faith

Of U. S. women flyers, the most consistently feminine is 30-year-old Laura Ingalls. She sports high heels, lipstick, orchid corsages, wears silk lingerie under her dungarees when working. She also has a sharp female tongue in her head, as clumsy airport mechanics upon whom she has used it can testify.

Early one morning last week in her native Brooklyn Miss Ingalls' new Wasp-powered Lockheed Orion Auto da Fe (Act of Faith) was trundled out of a hangar for a non-stop flight to California. Standing beside the gleaming black-&-silver monoplane, Miss Ingalls' dander rose when a bystander said something about a possible funeral. ''You be quiet!" she snapped, blue eyes blazing. Tiny (5 ft. 1 in.) Miss Ingalls next became angry over an airport ruling that she had to use an unfamiliar runway. Finally she took off, headed west, reached Burbank in 18 hr. 19 1/2 min.

As flights go, it did not amount to much. Miss Ingalls could have made better time, at considerably less expense and energy, by taking one of the regular transcontinental airliners. Nevertheless it was the first East-West non-stop coast-to-coast flight by a woman. Laura Ingalls left the stage to become a flyer in the wake of the Lindbergh boom. She had been by turns a vaudeville actress, Spanish dancer, graduate nurse, amateur detective. At Curtiss Field her small, helpless appearance at first evoked laughter. Later she was told she would never make a flyer. Indomitable, she kept on, got a secretarial job at a flying school to pay for lessons, became the 15th U. S. woman to get a transport license. For her able 17,000-mi. solo flight around South America last year, in which she "lost nothing--not even a garter," she received a national trophy from the Ligue Inter-Rationale des Aviateurs. Few months ago she became the first woman to win the coveted Scheduled Air Transport rating of the Bureau of Air Commerce.

A slim, birdlike little woman with dark bobbed hair, she is reticent, independent, has few close friends. She has logged some 1,500 hr., never crashed, believes firmly in astrology.

Her one ambition: to outdo Amelia Earhart.

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so reader's discretion is required.