THE WORLD''S FIRST FEMALE
AERONAUT was Aida de Acosta, a nineteen year old
Cuban debutante. She was
in Paris on holiday from her school in America in 1903 when she met Alberto Santos-Dumont, the famous Brazilian
aeronaut. He was the man who flew his own hot air ballon around the spire of the Eifel Tower on 19th October, 1901, and became the toast of Paris. He was a short, but dashing, impeccably dressed aeronaut and his invention of a lighter than air, cigar shaped, silk ballon from which was suspended a light bamboo basket caused a sensation. The innovative contraption was then referred to as a
dirigible. It had a gasoline engine and a steering wheel, like a car, for navigation and was very noisy. Aida begged Santos-Dumont to let her go up alone in his balloon and navigate it just like he did. He agreed for her to fly the ninth dirigible he had built, called La Baladeuse and gave her three hours of instruction.
Aida weighed twenty pounds more than Santos-Dumont and she was dressed in bulky but fashionable Victorian clothes, including a large black hat with pink roses on it. It was a tight fit for her to stand up in the basket, but she followed her instructor''s signals from the ground while aloft. Santos-Dumont rode a bicyle and waved a white handkerchief in the air to indicate when she should turn left or right. When he waved in a circular motion, she was to let the propellor go as fast as it could. If he dropped the handkerchief, she was to descend gently. Santos-Dumont tied the gas valve to Aida''s wrist so that, when she pulled on it, the gas would be let out of the bag and the dirigible would fall to the ground.
Aida flew around Paris for an hour and a half and landed on the polo field at Bagatell, at the northern end of the Bois de Bologne, where a match was about to start between the Americans and British. The polo horses bolted, startled by the noise of the engine, but none of the players minded the interruption to their game as the spectacle of a woman flying solo in a dirigible was so amazing. They helped her to get out of the basket by tipping it on its side so she could alight as decorously as possible. Aida''s parents,
however, minded very much and were adamant about not having any newspaper reports of her schoolgirl prank as they referred to the adventure. They threatened to cut off her allowance if she talked to the press about her experience.
Years later Aida became friends with Charles Lindbergh, the famous aeronaut. She married his lawyer, Colonel Henry Breckinridge, who served as Assistant Secretary of War under President Woodrow Wilson. It was only at a dinner in 1930 when the subject of lighter than air flight came up that Aida told anyone, including her husband, about her historic aerial journey over Paris in La Baladeuse.