Summary

Chapter 6 is titled “Flying Salesgirls.” In the first part of the chapter, the narration focuses on Ruth Nichols. She spent New Year’s Eve of 1927, in the days after the failure of the Ruth Elder flight and the disappearance of Frances Grayson, feeling at a loss about what to do with her life and her ambitions. That evening, though, she received an invitation from her former instructor, Harry Rogers, to join him on a coastal flight from New York to Florida. She was meant to come along for the publicity value of having a woman on the plane, but Nichols jumped at the opportunity to make a change in her life. The trip was accomplished smoothly, and Nichols was given a job as a sales representative for the company that manufactured the plane. She became, as the narration puts it, a “flying...