At 3:12 p.m. on the afternoon of Wednesday, June 28, 1939, Clara Adams took off from an airport on Long Island on the first leg of her planned flight around the world. She would not be following the ill-fated itinerary of her friend Amelia Earhart, who had, two years earlier, attempted to become the first woman pilot to circumnavigate the globe by air. Earhart had traced a course east from Oakland, California, along the equator until she disappeared somewhere in the South Pacific. Adams’s flight path would take her on a more northerly route, through Europe, the Middle East and Southeast Asia before island-hopping across the Pacific—a distance she calculated to be 24,609 miles.
Sixteen days, 19 hours, and four minutes later, Adams landed safely at Newark Airport, the fastest person, man or woman, to circle the earth by commercial airliner. But Clara Adams’s name is little remembered today because she was not a pilot. She was a passenger. “The first flighter” newspapers called her—“The maiden of maiden voyages,” who held tickets for every major inaugural flight through the dawn of air travel.
role: Author outlet: Atlas Obscura publication date: March 2022 category:History
