Ruth Nichols and A Tragic Plane Crash in Troy

Back in the early days of aviation, our area saw its fair share of famous flyers. After all, Glenn Curtiss launched a record-setting flight from the island that is now home to the Port of Albany; Amelia Earhart gave a lecture tour here and flew for Canajoharie’s Beech-Nut Gum; Lindbergh visited, as did A.F. Hegenberger and Bert Acosta. One of the most famous flyers in her day (and perhaps one of the most overlooked today, given her accomplishments) also had the distinction of suffering a terrible crash right in Troy, although she wasn’t piloting the plane.

Ruth Rowland Nichols was a young socialite from New York City who, like many other young people of means in her day, became enamored of flying, and quickly became famous for setting any number of records and firsts. She became a sales manager for Fairchild Aviation, and a founding member of the Ninety-Nines, an organization of licensed female pilots. She raced in derbies, she beat Lindbergh’s cross-country flight record, set the women’s altitude record, the women’s speed record, and the women’s distance record – all in 1931. She set a world altitude record for diesel-powered aircraft in 1932, and the same year became the first woman pilot of a commercial passenger airline – though how much she was actually allowed to fly isn’t clear. (A later government requirement that virtually required military experience to gain sufficient flight hours to pilot commercial meant it was 1973 before there was a female pilot at a major U.S. airline.)

In October 1935, the very famous Ruth Nichols came to the Capital District as part of a “good will” tour promoting air transportation; she and a number of others on her crew had spent a week in Troy and Albany as an observance of National Aviation Week, and on Friday, Oct. 18, Nichols was a surprise speaker at a meeting of the New York State Teachers Association; she spoke on “Woman’s Place in Aviation.”

The Troy Times Record of Oct. 12, 1935, wrote:

“Woman Good Will Flier Coming in 20-Seater Plane
Miss Ruth Nichols To Make Educational Trips from Troy Airport Beginning Tuesday.
Miss Ruth Nichols, noted woman flier, will make Troy a stop in a Good Will aeronautic-educational tour next Tuesday and will be greeted by Mayor Cornelius F. Burns, Robert Aldrich, director of the airport, and other city officials at the airport.
She will fly here in a mammoth twenty-passenger Curtiss-Condor plane, and will remain here until Sunday night during which time the plane will be used for passenger flights.
Ten per cent of the receipts will be turned over to the fund for the Little Sisters of the Poor.
Miss Nichols plans to deliver several addresses while she is in Troy.
Following the reception for Miss Nichols, the Mayor and city officials will be taken on an air tour of the area. When that tour is completed the plane will be used for passenger flights during the remainder of the week. Night flights will be possible as the Troy Airport is equipped with a good lighting system.”

The plane carried “several hundred persons” during the week they were here – later said to have been 1800 people. The events were a promotion for Chamberlin Airline, owned by Col. Clarence D. Chamberlin. Another Chamberlin plane had arrived the day before, and took off shortly before what would be a disastrous flight for Nichols.

On Monday, Oct. 21, Nichols and her crew took off from Troy on a flight to Teterboro Airport in New Jersey. The pilot was Captain Harry Hublitz. It as to be something of a special flight, as it was intended that two couples in the entourage – two stewardesses, a mechanic, and a ticket-taker – would be married while flying over New York City. It wasn’t to be. After taking off, the plane developed motor trouble just a half mile out.

“Hublitz circled the plane about and headed back for the airport, intending to make a landing from the east into a moderately high wind which was blowing. But he was compelled to make a forced landing before he could reach the airport and nosed the plane down into the farm of Frank Arrigo, an Italian farmer, who owns a piece of property just east of the airport property and approximately three-quarters of a mile from the airport buildings. Two trees about sixty feet tall stand alongside the Arrigo house. Hublitz was unable to maneuver the plane over them and it crashed into the tree tops where it hung for a minute. Then the plane fluttered onward about thirty feet and struck the ground flat.
As it struck the ground the plane burst into flames. Five of the six aboard jumped for safety. Flames licked after them, catching all of them slightly and Miss Nichols seriously. Hublitz, caught in the flames, was dragged to safety by his two co-workers and a crew of workmen engaged in a nearby field who had rushed toward the scene as they saw the plane obviously in trouble.
Two automobiles were commandeered, one a truck and the other a passenger car. Miss Nichols was carried to the truck unconscious and rushed to the hospital.”

After everyone had gotten clear of the plane, the fuel tank exploded, “exuding a black cloud of smoke which could be seen for miles . . . Upwards of a thousand persons flocked to the airport in the wake of the accident.

Hublitz was badly burned and died of his injuries about 11 hours later. Nichols was actually snagged in one of the trees and fell to the ground, according to a 15-year-old Helen Donalds of Campbell Avenue, who witnessed the crash. She and friend Marie Barry of Sheridan Avenue, both Catholic Central High School Students, “were at the airport ‘wishing to be taken up.’” They didn’t get their wish but were chatting with a mechanic when the plane’s distress became apparent.

“When we got to the top of that rise there in the fields we saw the plane down and burning and Miss Nichols was dropping down out of that elm. It looked as if she was helping herself, swing down by her hands like . . . Everybody thought the pilot Harry was out of the plane and gone to the hospital. There was an explosion when the gas tanks blew up and he was still in there. Somebody yelled, the pilot’s in there still and they got to him and dragged him out . . . That plane doesn’t look like much now, does it. All burned up here in a potato field. We’ve got pieces of the wings, and I’m going to write an English composition about it.”

An inquest began just two days after the crash, at a time when Nichols was still in critical condition and had not yet been informed of Hublitz’s death. The initial testimony involved the surviving crew members (which included another stewardess who had not joined the final flight), and revealed that the operation carried no insurance against death or injury to the 1800 persons who rode in the plane during its barnstorming week in Troy. It also turned out that the Troy Airport received no revenues, and in fact had provided free hangar space and lighting. Hanes and Holt said that there was motor trouble, and that on the return to the airport a downdraft struck the ship and dashed it into the trees; without that downdraft, they said he would have landed safely. Col. Clarence D. Chamberlin, owner of the plane, said that he leased it to Hublitz for the venture and was not legally responsible for accidents. Asked whether he would have taken off, “knowing that one engine was skipping,” Chamberlin said it would depend. “I have flown that same ship from Worcester to Boston on only one engine,” he said.

It was also revealed that most of the roughly $1800 taken in during the week’s flying was burned in the crash. The Little Sisters of the Poor received their $185 (10% of the proceeds) before the plane took off.

For a time it wasn’t clear that Nichols was going to make it, and she spent six weeks in Samaritan Hospital before she was able to return to her home in Rye, by airplane piloted by her brother, with a doctor at her side and a nurse who had been tending her at Samaritan having gone to Rye in advance to continue caring for her.

While she was still in Samaritan, she was set to testify in the inquest, but she called off the first interview because she didn’t wish to be photographed in bed, in bandages. It was her hope that when the inquest was convened “I may be seated in a chair, so that if any of the press still desire pictures they may take them at that time. If it is not possible for me to appear under more normal circumstances before I am able to leave for Rye, I am afraid the inquest will have to be continued without any pictures being taken of me.” In December, just before leaving Troy, she finally testified and was photographed.

She said that from her point of view, Hublitz managed the plane in the best possible way, but that just before the left wing of the plane hit the trees next to the airport, he said “I don’t believe we’ll make it.” The District Attorney Charles Ranney tried to make the point that such flights should have insurance, as was required of steamships and railroads, but Nichols “termed the expedition an ‘educational’ flight, and said that at low rates many passengers would leave the ground, advancing their confidence in aviation.” Troy’s Mayor Cornelius Burns said it was a surprise that it wasn’t Chamberlin’s flying service staging the tours. “I understood that it was the Chamberlin concern when we gave permission for the use of the field . . . We have learned a lesson from this incident and there will be no more barnstorming at the Troy Airport.”

In fact, the inquest found that Ruth Nichols had no legal involvement in the affair, as it was learned that she did not have a license to pilot the wrecked ship. Women were then not allowed to pilot transport planes. Just a few days before, she had addressed a women’s club in Albany, quoted as saying that while there was “not yet opportunity for women as transport pilots, air transportation offers many other opportunities. Stewardesses on air lines are women, while office forces employ many others. Eventually, she believes, actual piloting of the big ships will be open to women.”

Perhaps the strangest aspect of this crash was that the two couples who had planned to be married in the plane over New York City went ahead with their marriages, on the ground, in Troy. They were Ray Hanes and Gladys Berkenheiser, and Raymond “Bill” Holt and Nena Berkenheiser. Yes, the brides were sisters. All four had been associated with Ruth Nichols for seven years – Ray Hanes was the plane’s mechanic, Holt managed the tickets for the public air rides, and the Berkenheiser sisters served as stewardesses. “All four of the young people bore cuts and bruises from the plane crash. Both brides had lost their trousseaus and the bridegrooms had lost their luggage in the flaming plane.” They were told that Hublitz and Nichols were doing well, and the four thought that it was unlucky to delay a wedding, so a deputy city clerk and a minister were summoned to the Trojan Hotel to perform the ceremony at 7:30 p.m. the day of the crash. It wasn’t until the next day that they knew their friend, Capt. Hublitz, had died.

By the way, after initial investigation the plane was pulled from farmer Arrigo’s field to a gully south of the airport; after the police stopped guarding it, “souvenir seekers were in their glory . . .Working in darkness or else in the beam of flashlights they tore off bits of metal to take away with them. Others plainly were interested in salvage.”

It would be nearly a year before Ruth Nichols could fly again. According to her Wikipedia article, she went on to work for a Quaker organization called the Emergency Peace Campaign, and then in 1939 headed Relief Wings, performing emergency relief flights and assisting the Civil Air Patrol; eventually she attained the rank of lieutenant colonel in the CAP. After World War II, she was involved in a wide variety of humanitarian efforts. In 1958, at the age of 57, she set new women’s speed and altitude records in an Air Force F-102 Delta Dagger. She underwent NASA’s Mercury training in 1959, although NASA soon discarded the idea of female astronauts.

Unfortunately, Nichols apparently suffered from severe depression and took her life late in 1960.

The Troy Airport is a saga of its own that we’ll tell another day.