March 19, 2023, marks the 49th anniversary of Geraldine “Jerrie” Mock setting off to become the first female pilot to fly solo around the world. Born in Newark, Ohio, on November 22, 1925. Her interest and love of flying began at the age of seven when she and her father went for a flight in a Ford Trimotor.
During high school, Jerrie was the only girl to take a course in engineering, and upon graduation in 1943 enrolled as a student at the Ohio State University in Columbus. In 1945 Jerrie quit her studies and married her husband Russell Mock.
Jerrie and her husband learned to fly
When Jerries’ children started school, she became bored at home and convinced Russel that they should take flying lessons. Once qualified pilots, the pair bought a Cessna 180 that they named the “Spirit of Columbus” after the town where they went to college.
Jerrie’s passion for flying continued until the 1960s when few women worked outside the home. At the age of 38, the mother of three children decided that she wanted to circumnavigate the globe following the flight path that Amelia Earhart had taken when she disappeared in 1937.
To help finance her record-breaking flight Jerrie obtained a $10,000 loan from the Columbus Dispatch newspaper. The only condition was exclusively providing articles about her journey to the Ohio newspaper.
Before the circumnavigation, the furthest Jerrie had ever flown was from Ohio to the Bahamas. She had 750 hours of flying time, of which only 250 were solo flights. While the Cessna 180 could fly around the world, Jerri needed to add additional fuel tanks for some of the longer legs of the journey.
Three months before Jerrie was set to embark on her record-breaking journey, another female aviator with much more experience than Jerrie called “Joan Merriam Smith” was planning a similar feat. The press immediately jumped on the story calling the planned flights a race. Now worried that the Columbus Dispatch would pull its funding, Jerrie set off two weeks earlier than she had planned.
Jerrie flew east around the globe
The plane took off from what is now John Glenn Columbus International Airport (CMH), heading east from its first stop in Bermuda. From Hamilton, the flight continued with stops at the following locations.
- Ponta Delgado in the Azores
- Casablanca, Morocco
- Algiers, Algeria
- Tunis, Tunisia
- Tripoli, Libya
- El-Beida, Egypt
- Cairo, Egypt
- Dhahran, Saudi Arabia
- Karachi, Pakistan
- New Delhi, India
- Calcutta, India
- Rangoon, Burma
- Bangkok, Thailand
- Manila, Philippines
- Guam
- Wake Island
- Honolulu, Hawaii
- San Francisco, California
- Phoenix, Arizona
- Tulsa, Oklahoma
Jerrie and the Spirit of Columbus landed at the airport, where the epic journey began on April 17, 1964. Jerrie flew 22,860 miles during the flight in 29 days 11 hours, and 59 minutes.
Jerrie’s Cessna 180, the Spirit of Columbus that she used for the flight around the world, now hangs in the National Air and Space Museum at the Smithsonian Museum in Washington DC.
