10/11/2026
📅 On This Day in Aviation History — October 11, 1927
Five months after Charles Lindbergh’s historic flight to Paris, another aviator set out across the Atlantic hoping to make history of her own.
On October 11, 1927, Ruth Elder and her copilot and navigator, George Haldeman, departed Roosevelt Field on Long Island in a bright yellow Stinson SM-1 Detroiter appropriately named American Girl. Their destination was Le Bourget Airport outside Paris.
Elder was attempting something no woman had yet accomplished: a transatlantic airplane flight. Rather than duplicate Lindbergh’s route, the pair planned a longer course that kept them closer to established shipping lanes—an important consideration when flying a single-engine airplane across thousands of miles of open ocean.
Almost immediately, the Atlantic fought back.
American Girl encountered severe weather not long after departure, pushing the aircraft away from its intended course. Then came the more serious problem: an oil leak from the Wright Whirlwind engine. With their chances of reaching land rapidly disappearing, Elder and Haldeman spotted the Dutch tanker Barendrecht and brought the Stinson down in the Atlantic nearby. Both aviators were rescued unharmed.
Their airplane wasn't so fortunate. An attempt was made to recover American Girl from the water, but the aircraft caught fire and ultimately had to be abandoned.
Elder never reached Paris by air, but that didn't make her attempt insignificant. At a time when transoceanic flying remained extraordinarily dangerous, she had taken on one of aviation's greatest challenges—and survived a forced landing in the middle of the Atlantic.
The flight also carried her farther over water than any woman pilot before her. The Henry Ford records the distance as 2,623 miles, establishing a new distance record for a female pilot.
And although American Girl was lost, the Stinson name certainly wasn't. Today, visitors to Yanks Air Museum can see another chapter of Stinson history in our collection with our airworthy L-5 Sentinel, a very different Stinson built for a very different kind of flying.
From a 1920s transatlantic adventure to a World War II liaison aircraft, it's remarkable how much aviation changed in less than two decades.
✈️ Aviation Trivia: Ruth Elder later became a founding member of an organization created to support and advance women pilots. Do you know its name?
