flight, she has been to date officially higher, faster and farther in a straight line than any other woman. On March 6, 1931, she attained an altitude of 27,740 feet, besting the record previously held by Elinor Smith. In April of 1931, in her Wasp powered Lockheed, she established a speed record at Carleton, Michigan, attaining 210 miles per hour. In this, she excelled the record of 181 miles per hour I had set the year before. Then in October, 1931, on an attempted non-stop flight from California to New York, she established a new long distance record for women. She landed in Louisville, Kentucky, after covering 1977 miles without a stop—568 miles farther than Maryse Bastie of France had flown.
Miss Nichols has also to her credit an east-west transcontinental record of sixteen hours, fifty-nine and one-half minutes and a women’s west-east transcontinental record of thirteen hours twenty-one minutes. Both of these, of course, are reckoned on actual flying time and not elapsed time. That is, when she stopped for motor check and to refuel and over night at Wichita, time was taken out. Up to now, no women have made non stop transcontinental hops. But perhaps by the time you read this that statement may not be true.
Miss Nichols’ flying advisor is Clarence Chamberlin, the famous pilot who took Levine across the Atlantic in 1927. It is he who helped her in her plans for a solo transatlantic flight. While the first plane she obtained for this was damaged in a
