Originally published on the FAA’s internal website and at Medium
By K. Daniel Glover

Laura Houghtaling Ingalls might well have been one of those rare children capable of being whatever she wanted to be.

Born to the heirs of a tea fortune, she led a privileged life that included New York private schools and time studying music and language in Paris and Vienna. In an era where women had limited options outside the home, she worked not only as a secretary and nurse, but also as a pianist and vaudeville dancer. Then Ingalls found her calling in a relatively new field — aviation.

That choice initially made her a celebrity among the likes of Amelia Earhart and Ruth Elder. Ingalls set numerous records as a stunt pilot and achieved multiple firsts as an aviatrix. Eighty-seven years ago this month, she set a record of 714 consecutive barrel rolls, and a few years later she earned an international award for a solo flight around South America.

But as war with Germany loomed in the late 1930s, Ingalls made some choices that sent her aviation career into a nosedive from which she never recovered. She ended up in trouble with the Civil Aeronautics Authority and eventually spent time in jail for ties to the Nazis. For the rest of her life, Ingalls lobbied unsuccessfully for a presidential pardon.

A ‘darling of aviation’ soars
It is perhaps fitting that controversy surrounds the birthdate of a figure as controversial as Ingalls. She was born in Brooklyn, N.Y., sometime between 1893 (the date on her headstone) and a decade later, according to conflicting documents and her own vague court testimony in 1942. Ingalls was the daughter of Francis Ingalls and Martha Houghtaling, whose father was a wealthy tea merchant. The Ingalls family later gained another connection to affluence when Laura Ingalls’ brother married a granddaughter of powerful banker J.P. Morgan.

Although no known historical accounts explain why, Ingalls turned her attention to aviation in 1928. On Dec. 23, she flew solo for the first time over Roosevelt Island in New York and then went to the Universal Flying School in St. Louis. She was one of the first women to earn a federal commercial transport license from the Department of Commerce’s Aeronautics Branch, a classification that authorized her to fly any airplane on approved transport routes.

Less than a year after enrolling in the flying school, Ingalls set her first record in women’s aviation — 344 consecutive loops over Lambert-St. Louis Field. Although she bested the previous record of 46 loops by nearly 300, she told reporters she was “terribly disappointed” that a pause to pump gas from a reserve tank meant another 66 loops didn’t count.

She overcame her disappointment like the overachiever she was — by shattering her own record less than a month later. Ingalls flew 980 consecutive loops over nearly four hours in the air at Hatbox-Municipal Airport in Oklahoma, a feat that won her hundreds of dollars. “I was offered a dollar apiece for every loop I made over my record of 344,” she told one reporter.

That was just the beginning of a years-long stretch of records and firsts for Ingalls. The record for consecutive barrel rolls came next. Ingalls did 714 of them, besting the women’s record by 647 and the men’s mark by 297.

She shifted her aviation focus to speed and distance records after that milestone. Over the next several weeks, she finished third in the Women’s Dixie Derby from Washington, D.C., to Chicago, and then set the women’s transcontinental round-trip record — 30 hours and 25 minutes to get from New York to California, and 25 hours and 20 minutes to return. In that age of daredevils, Jessie Maude Keith-Miller and later Amelia Earhart quickly broke Ingalls’ record, but Ingalls reclaimed the west-east transcontinental record in 1935.
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