In 1929, as a 20 year old student pilot, Fay Gillis Wells became one of the first women to parachute out of a plane when the biplane she was flying broke apart during aerobatics instruction over Long Island Sound. That courage to take the big leap would characterize both of Wells’ careers - as a pioneering aviatrix and a foreign correspondent.
While obtaining her flying license outside New York, Fay Gillis so impressed the legendary Glenn Curtiss that he hired her to ferry and demonstrate his early open-cockpit planes across the country, becoming the first woman to be employed in such a job. During that time Fay met other women aviators, including Amelia Earhart, with whom she co-founded the women’s flying group, the 99’s, a group to which she remained dedicated throughout her life.
In 1930, Fay moved to Russia with her father, a mining engineer, a venue that ideally suited her thirst for accomplishment and adventure. She became the first American woman to pilot a plane in Soviet Russia, and round-the-world flyer Wiley Post chose Gillis to organize his landing fields and refuelings for the critical Russian leg of his epic, 1933 global flight. In return for her hard work, Post promised to take Fay on his next adventure to the Arctic.
But Fay had also begun working as a foreign correspondent for the New York Times and the Herald Tribune where she met and eloped to Africa with a fellow pilot and journalist, Linton Wells, even though Linton encouraged her to keep her commitment to Post. She said “I thought about [it] for about 30 seconds honeymoon”. Post, and his replacement co-pilot, Will Rogers were subsequently killed in a crash on that fateful voyage.
The honeymooning Wells covered the Italian invasion of Ethiopia together, their bylines sometimes appearing together on the same front page, and later, accompanied by their pet leopard, they made a colorful pair covering the burgeoning movie industry in Hollywood. By the 1960’s, Wells was a well known fixture to American radio listeners and television viewers, serving as Storer Broadcasting’s White House correspondent. She traveled with the White House press corps to Vietnam and was one of three women journalists covering President Richard Nixon’s historic trip to China in 1972. In December 2002, when she died at the age of 94, Wells was still serving her two great loves, sitting on a NASA advisory board helping to select the first journalist who would fly in space.
