Buy it here: Amazon | Barnes & Noble | PowellsIn the spring of 1928, Pancho was ready for a new adventure. The Mexican trip had been wonderful, exciting, memorable. She continued to regale her friends with her tales of adventure, embroidering them in the telling, conscious of herself as the main character in a dramatic narrative she could shape and reshape. She started up her parties again in the newly redecorated San Marino mansion. She rode her horses. But she was bored.Her cousin, Dean Banks, had just started taking flying lessons at an old balloon field in nearby Arcadia and asked her if she wanted to come along. Equally interested in new adventures and in not allowing Dean to get too much ahead of her in anything, she readily agreed. Although she had not considered the idea of taking flying lessons before that moment, now, suddenly, it seemed like the best idea in the world.The airfield wasn't much, a narrow dirt strip with two ancient cavernous balloon hangars, a mooring mast and a few pilots tending to World War I-vintage planes. Dean introduced her to Ben Caitlin, his teacher, who had learned to fly in France during the war. He stared at her. Her hair was still cut short, as it had been in Mexico, and she was wearing old riding clothes. Her arms and shoulders were hard and visibly muscled, like a man's."So you want to learn how to fly?" he said. He made his living giving flying lessons, but women were not his favorite pupils.Yes, she said."Now when is it you wanted to start learning?" he asked.Pancho didn't hesitate. "Well, right now is okay," she said.Caitlin reached into the front cockpit of one of the planes, grabbed a leather helmet and a pair of goggles and tossed it to her. Moments later, they were airborne, Pancho strapped in the front, Caitlin at the controls in back. She had been in an airplane once before, years ago. When her mother was still alive, the family had taken a scenic boat trip to Catalina Island. You could see the island from Grandmother Dobbins' house up on the cliff above Laguna Beach. The water was rough that day, the crossing, uncomfortable, and Pancho, as seasick as she would ever be, refused to get back on the boat to go to the mainland. She spotted a tiny plane that had just landed with a passenger, ran over and chartered it for a quick, uneventful return flight.Her first flight with Ben Caitlin that spring morning was uneventful, too. She liked the fast taxi down the dirt strip, dust flying everywhere, and she liked suddenly, effortlessly being lifted above it all, the engine loud in her ears, the wind whipping at her face. But before she had a chance to feel airborne, they were down again, and Ben was jumping out of the cockpit. They agreed to another, longer flight the next day.The morning was bright and clear. Ben took the little plane up to a thousand feet, then banked it sharply to the right, dipping the wing straight down. The horizon disappeared; the earth tilted to meet them. Pancho felt her body being pulled, its weight straining against the seat straps. Ben straightened it out, but before Pancho could get her bearings, he pointed the nose up and looped the plane in a long, slow outside circle, turning the world upside down. They flew belly up for a long moment. When they came out of it, Ben rolled the plane, wing over wing, first to the right, then to the until Pancho didn't know what was earth and what was sky any more. He climbed again, put the plane into a stall and spun it straight down in a tight spiral. The earth came at them, spinning like a platter. In a few hundred feet, the nose of the plane would bore a hole in the ground. At what looked like the last possible moment, Ben pulled out of it, straightened out and landed on the little airstrip.When they had taxied to a stop, he yelled up to her, grinning. "Still want to learn how to fly?" He had, in aviation parlance, "wrung her out good." He expected to see her pale and shaken, queasy, finished with flying. But there she sat, grinning back, her face flushed, her eyes a little wild, riding the last wave of an adrenaline rush so exquisite that it was almost painful to feel it ebb away."Hell yes, I want to learn how to fly," she told him. He shook his head, trying to figure her out. "I suppose I'll have to teach you," he said. "But I have to tell you, I've had thirty-three women students and not a single one of them has ever soloed."Pancho came to the airfield several times a week from then on. Ben charged her five dollars for a fifteen minute lesson. They wore no parachutes because Ben couldn't afford them. In the cockpit, there wasn't much to learn. The only instrument was an oil gauge. Pilots looked over the side to judge altitude. They dipped a string in the gas tank to gauge fuel level. They hung a key chain from the control board to show them if they were flying straight. In the cockpit, life was simple: stick and rudder, up and back, left and right. The planes stayed in the air, when they stayed in the air, by quick thinking and guts. Flying was eighty-five percent man and fifteen percent machine, Ben always told her. There was no talking tube between the two open cockpits, so Ben instructed by hand signals: hand up meant point the nose of the plane up; hand down, nose down. Hand out to the side meant pick that wing up; hand on the right cheek meant the plane was skipping or skidding to the right and needed correction.Ben started by teaching her how to fly straight and level, pointing to a road below so she could orient herself. It didn't take her long to catch on, tracing the road from above, holding the nose level by gauging the horizon line and keeping her eye on the key chain. Next he started her on turns, then figure-eights. Each day was a new challenge; each day, another thrill. Ben had never had a female student as quick to learn and as fearless as Pancho, one so eager, one who took so much pleasure out of the act of flying.When the lesson was over, Ben would take the plane up around 1200 feet and perform aerobatics -- wing-overs, loops, barrel rolls, slips, stalls and spins. He wasn't trying to scare her anymore. He was just having fun. He was also showing her how it felt when an engine stalled out, which happened often in those tiny planes, and what to do when the ship started spinning. One evening, at dusk, they were flying back in after another lesson when, with Ben at the controls, the plane went into a dizzying spin and came down to within fifty feet of the ground before Ben pulled it out and landed. As soon as they stopped taxiing, he jumped out of the cockpit and leaned against the side of the plane. Pancho joined him."Well, Ben, I've got to the point where nothing worries me anymore," she said, laughing. "You were pretty low that time but, you know, I'm just so used to these maneuvers that I never get scared." Ben didn't say anything, so she looked at him more closely. His breathing was quick and shallow."We damn near got it," he said. "The rudder stuck, and I kicked it and fought it all the way down. I just kicked it hard enough and got it loose. But we almost spun in." Pilots always talked about "spinning in," never about crashing. After that, Ben didn't spin anymore. A few days later, the owner of the airplane they were using, a man named Jimmy Rosen, spun in. The ship was demolished, and Jimmy was killed instantly. A while later, another flyer crashed into the old balloon mooring mast. His plane ricocheted and bounced onto the Pacific Electric railroad tracks that bordered the airfield, cutting down twenty-eight power poles along the way. Crashes were commonplace, although it was equally commonplace for a pilot to walk away from a wreck. The planes flew only ninety miles an hour, often less, and were easy to jump clear from. The dirt runways and pasturelands where the pilots set down were forgiving. Pancho didn't think about the danger, or if she did, it was only to acknowledge that it was the danger that leavened the thrill.By early summer, she was ready to learn how to land. The Arcadia airstrip was short with a nasty prevailing cross-wind and a stand of tall eucalyptus trees on the east end. A few of the trees had been topped and trimmed to leave space for an airplane to slink through on its approach, but the clearance was tight. A pilot had to side slip a plane through the gap in the trees, left wing pointed down, then quickly straighten out before setting the ship down. The landings looked spectacular, but to Pancho, who learned the graceful maneuver easily, it was just normal procedure. By summer she was also ready to own her own plane. Barnstormers were paying $600 for World War I surplus Jennies. Amateur pilots might spend $1000 for a decent little plane. But Pancho was accustomed to getting the best. In early July, she bought a used Travelair biplane for $5500, five times what an average family made in a year.Now she was spending all her time out at the airfield with Ben, her cousin Dean and the pilots who flew in and out of Arcadia. Her mother's money supported her. Servants kept the San Marino house running. A nanny took care of her son. Seven and a half years into her marriage to the Reverend Barnes, there was not only no marriage but now no pretense of a marriage. Rankin lived in the rectory; Pancho lived in the big house. There was no formal, legal separation but they never lived together again. There was also no animosity. Pancho liked Rankin, and he was fond of her. In small doses, they actually enjoyed each other's company. But the non-marriage marriage suited them both. Rankin got a wife he did not have to support or service. He was free to pursue his ambitions in the church, wherever they took him. Even if he allowed himself to dream of a more suitable wife, a helpmate who would entertain church officials and hostess teas for the ladies, he knew that the risks of such a dream outweighed the benefits. He was moving up in the church hierarchy now, becoming noticed on the national level. Divorce and remarriage would jeopardize everything he had worked for."Dearest sweetheart," he wrote to her when he traveled that year. He was away from California much of 1928, traveling on church business to the east, on family business to the midwest. His letters were kind and chatty, affectionate without being intimate, a friend writing a friend. He kept in touch, told her where he was going and what he was doing, inquired after Billy but never said he missed her. She responded in kind, fondly but with little emotion.Pancho, too, thought little of divorce. Marriage was, as far as she could tell, a confining institution with few benefits to confer on an independent woman of means. She had no desire to be married to anyone, but the current situation was quite tolerable. She had a husband she didn't have to make a home for or share her life with. She had no responsibilities as either wife or mother. But, if she needed to, if society forced her to, she could fall back on the respectability of being a married woman.Now she was consumed with only one thing: She wanted to solo in her plane. Soloing, flying alone and in complete control, would mean she was a real pilot. But her teacher didn't think she was ready after less than six hours in the air. The situation was further complicated when Ben and the other pilots flying out of Arcadia were kicked off the airfield after one crash too many. While Ben looked around for another venue, Pancho moved her plane to an airfield at Baldwin Park, a few miles southeast of Arcadia. Instead of a eucalyptus tree hazard, this one had a big red barn sitting on the path for take-offs.Pancho and her cousin Dean frequented Ben's house several times a week to play poker and nag him about allowing Pancho to solo. They let him win at cards, hoping to get in his good graces, but the strategy didn't work. Increasingly impatient and characteristically over-confident, Pancho took matters into her own hands. She and Dean hooked up with a friend who claimed to have once flown solo. The three of them kidnapped Pancho's plane, with Dale, the young friend, at the controls and Pancho and Dean squeezed together in the passenger cockpit. Dale managed to take off, narrowly missing the red barn, and fly south to San Diego, but he had great trouble landing. Pancho counted how many passes he made over the field -- two, three, six, eight, and still he couldn't land it. Eventually, they got down in one piece, and Pancho immediately ran over to the resident field instructor asking to solo. He refused. They took off again, in search of a more agreeable instructor. At Santa Ana airport, their next stop, Pancho tried again and again was refused. Now it was dusk, and the weather was turning bad. With Dale at the controls, they set off in the rain to try to find their way to Culver City. The fog rolled in, and they had to fly low to get their bearings. Pancho had never been scared in an airplane before, but she was worried now. They were lost. It was dark, and fuel might soon be a problem. Dale, whether he had actually soloed before or not, was flying way beyond his abilities. Pancho also realized that, despite her earlier bravado, she was not skilled enough to pilot the plane either. It was only luck that they happened on an airfield in Compton, many miles from their destination. Shaken, they left the plane there and caught a ride back home.Ben was furious when he learned of their dangerous escapade and refused to give Pancho any more lessons, let alone authorize her to fly solo. It took her most of the rest of the summer to get back into his good graces. When he finally agreed to take her on as a student again, he told her that she would have to make six perfect landings in a row before he would allow her to take the ship up alone. Day after day, she drove out to Baldwin Park to practice her three-point landings. The airfield there was a little longer than Arcadia with fewer hazards and more direct wind. That made landing easier, but it was still the hardest part of learning to fly. She kept at it. Finally, one afternoon in early September, she taxied back to the hangar after her sixth perfect landing. Ben climbed out of the ship and told her to take it up by herself.She opened the throttle and roared down the field before he could change his mind. The little plane lifted into the air so quickly that it surprised her. Without Ben's weight, the plane soared. She sat in the open cockpit caught in the moment, completely focused, almost breathless with joy. She scanned the horizon. She looked earthward. She checked the key chain hanging from the controls. She pulled back slightly on the stick. Then she stopped thinking and started flying. She climbed to a thousand feet and circled the field a few times, then brought it in for a good landing. She had been airborne, alone, for five minutes. She was a pilot.Ben barely had time to congratulate her when she took off again, this time with her first passenger, a childhood friend named Nelse Griffith. The excitement of being up with a new pilot was not enough for him. They were all daredevils. They were all invincible."Hey, let's show them something," he yelled at Pancho when they had flown around for a few minutes. "I'll wing walk. You bring it across the field low." Nelse inched out of the passenger cockpit and stepped out onto the wing, crouching, holding the flying wires with both hands. Pancho, grinning, flew the plane fifty feet above the field, made a pass, then zoomed up and came around again with Nelse still clutching the wires. When she unloaded Nelse, it was Dean's turn for a run. She didn't want the afternoon to end. Up above the earth, in the pilot's seat, she was herself -- no apologies, no compromises, no holding back. This was an adventure of her own making, and she could have it any day she wanted. The German flyer Thea Rasche, a contemporary of Pancho's, said that flying was "more thrilling than love for a man and far less dangerous." For Pancho the thrill was more visceral. "Flying," she told her friends, "makes me feel like a sex maniac in a whorehouse."Buy it here: Amazon | Barnes & Noble | Powells