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Lady Jack Lang: First Woman in Flight

She Flew Over Washington with Wilbur Wright in 1909

Jul 17, 2008 Rosemary E. Bachelor

"Cut off the engine, Jack!," Wilbur Wright called to Sadie Van Deman in 1909 as they flew over Washington in a slat and muslin plane.

This fearless beauty was the first woman airplane passenger. The former Sadie Rice, she was the daughter of a western miner and cattleman. She didn’t like her name so called herself Jaqulin, soon shortened to Jack. At the time of the flight, she was Mrs. Ralph Van Deman.

Lady Jack, experienced in ballooning, lashed her skirts around her legs with rope, covered her hair and boarded the plane, waiting on its launching catapult. Wilbur sat in the single wicker bucket seat on one side of the engine. Jack lay prone, gripping the edge of the flimsy wing on the engine's opposite side.

Jack and Wilbur flew between trees and circled the Capitol dome. She later recalled how the chain and sprocket driven propellers beat the air, the engine chugging furiously and the slipstream howled through spruce struts.

Months before, Wilbur had put his biplane through its aerial paces for the U. S. Army. He flew Sadie over Washington just prior to the federal government’s July 30, 1909 acceptance of his biplane.

Jack knew the Wright brothers first in Ohio and later in Washington. She was a friend of their sister, Katharine Wright, who supported the aviation pioneers while they worked in their bicycle shop laboratory.

“Their little bicycle shop didn’t make any money,” she recalled. Sadie wouldn’t fly with Orville Wright. “He wasn’t the flying man; he was the finance man,” she said.

There was supposed to be movie footage of the flight, but it turned out there was no film in the hand-crank camera.

Lady Jack claimed she almost wasn’t the first female airplane passenger. “Alice Roosevelt was determined she was going up first,” Sadie explains. “She invited Wilbur and Orville to an exquisite luncheon, but to no avail,” said Sadie, who called almost everyone a “critter” and smoked Camels in a holder.

Before Sadie’s life was over she had been around the world seven times and married and divorced a young capitalist, a dentist and an Army captain before settling down with Navy Commander Charles Lang.

In 1911, Harriet Quimby was the first woman to earn a pilot’s license. Marion Rice Hart was, at age 74, the first woman to make a solo transatlantic flight.

(This story is based upon an interview with Lady Jack when, almost 80, she was widowed, partially blind and deaf, and living alone in a two-room suite at a Monterey, California hotel. It appeared in the Monterey Herald and News and, accompanied by information from a Rice relative, was the basis for a story in the 2002 book The Rice Family: Celebrating Our Diversity).

The copyright of the article Lady Jack Lang: First Woman in Flight in Historical Biographies is owned by Rosemary E. Bachelor. Permission to republish Lady Jack Lang: First Woman in Flight in print or online must be granted by the author in writing.