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Gladys Gertrude Ingle (March 28, 1899 – October 27, 1981)

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✪ Gladys Gertrude Ingle was an American pilot, a wing walker, daredevil and aerial stunt performer. She is most well known for being the only female member of the aerial stunt team, the 13 Flying Black Cats.

Ingle was the fourth woman to receive a pilot’s license the United States. She began her career in 1921 with her sister Ann; performing jumps from balloons for the C.P.O. Aerial Circus. By 1922, she had graduated to doing stunts involving airplanes. Through her performances in the 1920s and 1930s, she became world-renowned for her aerobatics and wing walking.

Gladys Ingle was born on March 28, 1899 in Walla Walla, Washington. She had two brothers and one sister. As a child growing up in Oregon she developed a early talent for walking on fences. She created a pair. of stilts so tall she had to mount them from the roof of her home. In her adolescence, she developed an interest for racing motorcycles, before moving to Southern California.

Ingle married Delles Richard Potter on February 27, 1917, in Baker, Oregon. They had one daughter together, Bonnie Dell Potter, who was born in 1917.

Ingle performed her first airplane first stunt when she and her sister would have a parachute race to the ground after jumping from two separate planes.

Gladys Ingle became the only female member of the 13 Flying Black Cats. a travelling, professional aerial exhibition team which began in 1925, The 13 Flying Black Cats routinely boasted in their advertising they would do ANYTHING for the right price. They performed primarily at air shows around Los Angeles and the Southwest but eventually found a niche in performing for movie newsreels. The group’s homebase was the former Burdett Airport located on Western Avenue in present-day Inglewood. Many members of the team also worked at the airport as pilots and mechanics. 

During the time Gladys was most active professionally, aviation technology was still young and mostly unregulated. However this period, often refered to as the Golden Age Of Barnstormimg would prove to be short-lived, and last less barely than a decade. From after the end of World War One until 1927, there were almost no regulations or government oversight on flying, and very little interference from insurance regulators. Unfortunately, it was also a time when people were routinely injured or killed by unscrupulous flying companies and poorly-trained pilots.

The Black Cats were the first group to develop a set scale wage for aerial stunts, which provided a model for the first movie stunt pilots’ union, founded by aviatrix Florence Lowe “Pancho” Barnes (1901-1975) in 1931.

The 13 Flying Black Cats charged an event fee of one hundred dollars for an ordinary plane-change (an aerial stunt artist jumping from one plane to another in midflight). Five hundred dollars to perform a change made between an upside-down aircraft to one flying right side up. A crowd thrilling addition included a faked accident with the apparent victim falling off the aircraft and tumbling about four hundred feet before a thin cable (invisible to the audience) suddenly opened a hidden parachute; to the gasped relief of the audience.

Other paid events stunts included $150 for a parachute jump with a 1000 foot freefall, and $450 for performers to stand on the wings during a completed loop.

Ingle performed continuously in aerial stunts throughout the 1920s and 1930s during which she became most renowned for wing walking. Her stunts included moving from plane to plane in mid-air and standing on the wing of a plane as it passed under a bridge. Ingle’s most famous stunt involved replacing a wheel in mid-air. When a wheel would fall off an airplane mid flight, Ingle would strap a spare wheel on her back and be flown to a rendezvous with the stricken plane. In mid-air, she would climb from the first plane to the top of the upper wing of the second plane and transfer to the bottom wing of the plane in distress. She would then climb down to the landing gear and install the new wheel. This was filmed on at least one occasion:

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In the newsreel, we can see her clinging to a bi-plane as it takes off and flies beneath another bi-plane which is missing a wheel. She carefully walks along the wing to climb onto  the lower wing of the other aircraft flying directly above her. She swings under the bi-plane and, with some difficulty, attaches a new wheel  before climbing back onto the wing with a quick wave at the camera.

While the original time this stunt was performed involved a real emergency situation, Ingle would go on to perform it more than 100 times in her career.

In another stunt, Ingle would shoot arrows at targets while wing walking on the top wing. When asked by reporters if she ever felt frightened, she replied, “Nothing to it at all, nothing to it.” However, she was still involved in several forced landings and crashes.

In 1928, The San Bernardino County Sun reported Ingle doubled for movie stars and appeared in films. In her career, she successfully transferred from the wing of one aircraft to the wing of another in mid-air more than 300 times.

Unfortunately, her career was cut short in 1931 when The US Government enacted legislation which would ban passenger access from the “wooden structures in planes.” That is, a new regulation which specified passengers must remain seated inside the aircraft. This meant Ingle and other aviation stunt performers would no longer be allowed to walk on wings or transfer mid-air from plane-to-plane. By the time the Great Depression began in earnest, the Golden Age Of Barnstorming had already officially come to an end.

Ingle continued to live the remainder of her life in Southern California. In 1981, she moved to Arroyo Grande, California, to live with her daughter Bonnie. She passed away from natural causes at her daughter’s home on October 27, 1981. She was posthumously inducted into the International Air & Space Hall of Fame in 1989. ✪