Phoebe Fairgrave Omlie, the Teenage Wing Walker Who Rode Out the Barnstorming Era and Helped Build the Aviation Infrastructure That Followed

Phoebe Fairgrave Omlie began her aviation career standing on the lower wing of a Curtiss Jenny biplane over Iowa cornfields at seventeen years old. She went on to become a record-setting pilot, a co-founder of the Ninety-Nines, and the first woman to hold a significant senior position in the U.S. federal government’s aviation administration. The infrastructure she helped build in the 1930s - from airmarking programs to pilot training pipelines - directly supported American military aviation readiness in World War II.

The World She Walked Into: Barnstorming After World War I

The war ended in November 1918, leaving the United States with tens of thousands of trained military pilots and no use for them. The Army had trained more than 10,000 pilots during the war, most of them in the Curtiss JN-4 - the airplane universally called the Jenny. When the fighting stopped, the government auctioned off the surplus fleet.

A Jenny could be had for as little as $50. Even well-equipped examples rarely fetched more than $250. For that price, a buyer got a fabric-covered biplane with a 43-foot wingspan, a 90-horsepower OX-5 engine, and a top speed around 75 mph. No radio. No instruments worth mentioning.

Young veterans bought them by the hundreds.

What Barnstorming Actually Was

The term came from theater. In the 1800s, traveling acting troupes called barnstormers would arrive in small towns, rent a barn, and put on a show. Aviators borrowed the name and the concept wholesale.

A barnstormer would appear unannounced over a farming community, circle low to draw a crowd, and land in the nearest flat field. Then came the hand-painted sign: airplane rides, one dollar. For a dollar in 1922, a passenger got roughly fifteen minutes in an open cockpit at a thousand feet - the first aerial view of their own town that any human being had ever experienced.

Operators who thought commercially figured out quickly that a crowd-drawing act multiplied the ride revenue. That insight created wing walking.

What Wing Walking Actually Required

Wing walking was not a controlled stunt with safety equipment. A performer climbed out of the front cockpit in flight, found footing on the lower wing moving through the air at sixty miles an hour, and faced a slipstream equivalent to a solid wall of pressure. The wing vibrated with every engine pulse. The jacket tried to inflate like a sail.

Skilled performers walked toward the wingtip. Some did handstands on the upper wing. Some hung from bars mounted above the fuselage. The most impressive acts transferred from one aircraft to another mid-air, usually via a rope ladder lowered from the upper plane.

Early shows used no harnesses. The performers who drew the biggest crowds did it free - just grip, nerve, and whatever kept them oriented. People fell. People died. The next show drew a crowd anyway.

Phoebe Fairgrave Enters Aviation

Phoebe Fairgrave saw one of these shows around 1919 or early 1920. She was seventeen and from Des Moines, Iowa. She walked up to Vernon Omlie, who ran a small barnstorming outfit, and made the case that she should be part of it. Vernon had practical reasons to decline. He hired her anyway.

She was good - physically coordinated, nervy, with an instinct for what a crowd wanted to see. But she was already pushing toward something harder to obtain: she wanted to fly.

This was not a simple ambition in 1920. Harriet Quimby had been the first American woman to earn a pilot’s certificate, back in 1911, and had died in a crash in 1912. Katherine Stinson had flown the mail and set records through the teens. Bessie Coleman, the first Black woman to earn a pilot’s license anywhere in the world, had been turned away by every American flight school and had to travel to France to get her certificate in 1921. Aviation’s barriers to women were institutional, not merely personal.

Vernon Omlie taught her to fly regardless.

Pilot Certificate, Partnership, and Early Records

Phoebe earned her pilot’s certificate in 1921, making her one of roughly a dozen licensed women pilots in the entire country. During the training, she and Vernon fell in love. They married in 1922. The partnership was professional and personal in equal measure, and it shaped everything that came after.

The barnstorming operation they ran together out of Memphis was a serious outfit. Phoebe was accumulating real hours in real aircraft, and her ambitions were scaling up with her experience.

In 1927, she flew to an altitude of 25,400 feet - close to five miles above sea level - in an open cockpit, without a pressure suit, and without supplemental oxygen for most of the climb. The temperature at altitude was approximately 40 below zero. She set the women’s altitude record and came back down to compete again.

The Air Commerce Act and the End of Pure Barnstorming

The crashes were making headlines with a consistency that was becoming a public relations catastrophe for aviation. A wing walker losing her grip in front of thousands of spectators. A barnstormer stalling on takeoff with a full passenger load. The spectacle that attracted the crowds was also attracting Congress.

In May 1926, Congress passed the Air Commerce Act and President Coolidge signed it - the first federal regulatory framework for civil aviation in American history. It authorized the Commerce Department to certify aircraft for airworthiness, license and rate pilots, designate airways, and investigate accidents. The FAA came later, in 1958; the Air Commerce Act was the foundation everything else was built on.

Pure barnstorming did not survive the regulation. Uncertified aircraft could not carry passengers for hire. Unlicensed pilots could not either. The surplus Jennies, already approaching a decade old and increasingly held together by wire and optimism, started disappearing from the circuit.

Phoebe Omlie was already ahead of it. She had her certificate. She was flying certified aircraft. And she had her sights on something bigger.

The 1929 Women’s Air Derby and the Founding of the Ninety-Nines

In the summer of 1929, 96 women held pilot certificates in the entire United States. Twenty of them entered the first National Women’s Air Derby.

The race ran from Santa Monica, California to Cleveland, Ohio - roughly 2,700 miles over eight days. Each pilot flew her own aircraft across the Mojave Desert, the Rocky Mountains, and the American Midwest. One competitor died in an accident during the race. Others made forced landings in unplanned locations due to mechanical failures.

Will Rogers called it the Powder Puff Derby. The name stuck. Most of the women flying it hated it.

Phoebe flew a Monocoupe 110. She won the light plane division and finished second overall. The race made national news and demonstrated, plainly and publicly, that women could navigate, compete, and fly long distances with professional competence.

Later that year, Phoebe was among the founders of the Ninety-Nines - the international organization of licensed women pilots. Founding members included Amelia Earhart, Louise Thaden, Ruth Nichols, and others. They named the organization for the number of charter members: ninety-nine licensed women pilots who had decided to organize and fight for their place in aviation.

From the Cockpit to Federal Policy

Phoebe campaigned for Franklin Roosevelt in 1932, flying her own airplane across Tennessee to make the case at campaign stops in person. Roosevelt remembered her.

In 1933, Roosevelt appointed Phoebe Omlie to a senior position in the Bureau of Air Commerce - making her the first woman to hold a significant federal government aviation post.

One of her early initiatives was the airmarking program. Flying cross-country in that era without GPS, VORs, or radio navigation meant dead reckoning from landmark to landmark and hoping the town on the horizon matched the chart. Phoebe organized a national campaign to paint town names on the roofs of barns, grain elevators, and water towers, with arrows pointing toward the nearest airport. Thousands of locations eventually received markers across the country. Pilots used them for years.

The Civilian Pilot Training Program and World War II

Phoebe advocated from inside the federal system for airport construction, improved training standards, and sustained investment in aviation infrastructure. When the Civilian Pilot Training Program launched in 1939, funded by Congress and administered through colleges across the country, it reflected years of that advocacy.

The program trained more than 300,000 civilian pilots before the war.

When Japan attacked Pearl Harbor in December 1941, the United States had a generation of young people who already knew how to fly - trained at small airports, grass strips, and college airfields from Maine to California. The rapid expansion of American military aviation during the war was built on that foundation. That foundation was not accidental.

Loss, Continued Service, and Legacy

Vernon Omlie died in 1936 - not barnstorming, but as a passenger aboard a TWA airliner that went down in fog over Missouri. Aviation in all its forms continued to demand its price.

Phoebe kept working. She remained in federal aviation service through the Depression and the war years, continuing to advocate for women in the field and for the kind of investment in training and infrastructure she had come to see as aviation’s only viable path forward.

Phoebe Fairgrave Omlie died in 1975. She spent fifty-five years in aviation after standing on that wing over Iowa at seventeen - most of them working to ensure that the spark the barnstorming era lit didn’t go out when the Jennies did.

Why This Matters for Pilots Today

The structural elements of American civil aviation - certified aircraft, licensed pilots, navigable airways, trained pilot pipelines - did not appear by themselves. They were built by people who understood both what aviation could be and what it was costing to get there. Phoebe Omlie was present at every inflection point: barnstorming, regulation, record-setting, organization, and federal policy.

The Ninety-Nines she co-founded still operates today. The regulatory framework built on the Air Commerce Act of 1926 is the ancestor of every certification and airworthiness standard a pilot encounters now. The pilot training pipeline she helped construct in the 1930s established the pattern civilian aviation training has followed ever since.

Key Takeaways

Phoebe Fairgrave Omlie began as a teenage wing walker in 1920 and became the first woman in a senior U.S. federal aviation post in 1933, appointed by President Roosevelt to the Bureau of Air Commerce.
She set the women’s altitude record in 1927 - 25,400 feet in an open cockpit - and placed second overall in the first National Women’s Air Derby in 1929.
She co-founded the Ninety-Nines in 1929 alongside Amelia Earhart and others, at a moment when only 96 women held pilot certificates in the entire United States.
Her airmarking program painted town names and airport directions on rooftops nationwide, giving pre-navigation-era pilots a critical visual reference network across the country.
The Civilian Pilot Training Program she helped champion trained more than 300,000 pilots before World War II, providing the foundation for rapid military aviation expansion after Pearl Harbor.

Historical sources: Ninety-Nines Museum of Women Pilots archives, Oklahoma City; Tennessee Aviation Hall of Fame records.