Women in Transportation History: Phoebe Omlie, Aviation Trailblazer

Aviation pioneer Phoebe Jane Fairgrave Omlie was born on November 21, 1902, in Des Moines, Iowa. When Omlie was 12 years old, she and her family moved to Saint Paul, Minnesota. Her lifelong interest in aviation started the day before she graduated from Mechanic Arts High School in Minnesota’s capital city in 1920. This was when she attended her first airshow, which too place in nearby Minneapolis.

Omlie subsequently began hanging around airfields near her home and learned how to fly a plane. She was soon performing numerous stunts up in the air — including the Charleston dance on a wing of a plane — while another pilot remained at the controls. 

Omlie’s accomplishments up in the skies resulted in her eventually performing airborne acrobatic stunts for silent films. It was through these big-screen opportunities that she met and first flew with fellow pilot Vernon C. Omlie. The two of them flew across the country on a barnstorming tour and, in 1922, were married. They moved to Memphis in 1925. (Tragically, he was among those killed in a commercial flight that crashed in St. Louis during foggy weather in 1936.) 

Phoebe Omlie’s pioneering aviation achievements included being the first female to cross the Rocky Mountains in a light aircraft; earn a license as a plane mechanic; and serve as a licensed transport pilot. She also became the first woman appointed to a federal position in the aviation field when President Franklin D. Roosevelt named her a special advisor for air intelligence to the National Advisory Committee for Aeronautics. First Lady Eleanor Roosevelt singled out Omlie as somebody “whose achievements make it safe to say the world is progressing.”  

Omlie died on July 17, 1975, in Indianapolis at the age of 72. She was buried next to her husband at Forest Hill Cemetery in Memphis.

Photo Credit: Public Domain (https://creativecommons.org/publicdomain/zero/1.0/)

For more information on Phoebe Omlie, please check out https://www.faa.gov/sites/faa.gov/files/about/history/pioneers/Phoebe_Omlie.pdf