07/20/2026
How did I become the pilot of THIS?!
On October 25th, 2025, I got my sport pilot license, completing all my training and my checkride in a 1931 Curtiss Junior. I am pretty sure I am the first person to do this since about 1938, and the history of it was incredibly important to me: I wanted to experience what learning to fly during the Golden Age of Aviation was really like, and I lived every moment of it as authentically as possible. Decked out with a Gosport tube and vintage leather jacket, I flew without a radio, in weather down to 40 and up to 85, on pavement and grass runways. I ate picnics in the airport grass, spilled gasoline all over my clothes, and sometimes flew multiple lessons a day. I drove 6 hours each way to my base airport (several times with my cat Athena as car companion), missing weeks of work (and often repairing my car en route), but it was worth every minute! Even when I was overwhelmed, nervous, or frustrated, at the end of each day I had to pinch myself, knowing I was sharing an adventure across the decades with the brave barnstorming women pilots of the 1930s. I am the luckiest girl in the world!
It was a 5+ year process, with tons of help, support, encouragement, generosity, and advice from dozens of people. In particular I want to thank Kent McMakin, Jack Hurdle, my brother Esperé, Pat Weeden, Mandy & Chad Hill, and most of all my CFI & mentor, Chad Wille. Finally, a very special thanks to Tony Condon for being willing to do a checkride in that airplane with no voice communication! I searched for 6 months and called half a dozen DPEs, and Tony is the only one who said “Why not?”
If you told me as a child that I would be a pilot, I would have thought you were crazy; the cost, skill, equipment, and opportunity seemed impossible, I never thought of myself as mechanically minded or fascinated by flight, and the medical requirements can be daunting. If you ask almost any aviation person how to learn to fly like it’s 1930, they’ll laugh and say the only way is to time travel. To my delight and astonishment, somehow that is exactly what I got to do.
