Fifty years after she made aviation history, Jerrie Mock chuckled when asked whether she ever got scared while circling the globe alone.
“Scared? Let’s not use the word scared,” she said.
But she had plenty of harrowing moments, from landing by mistake on an Egyptian military base to seeing a burning wire aboard her plane loaded with extra fuel.
Geraldine “Jerrie” Mock, the Ohio housewife who became the first female pilot to fly solo around the world, died Tuesday in her sleep at her Quincy, Florida, home, grandson Chris Flocken said Wednesday. She was 88 and had been in declining health for months.
She was inspired as a child by Amelia Earhart. But while she considered Earhart her hero, Mock said she didn’t dwell on the aviation pioneer’s fate as she made her own journey 27 years after Earhart and navigator Fred Noonan disappeared in the South Pacific while Earhart was trying to become the first female aviator around the globe.
Mock played down her trip as a fun adventure. She flew her single-engine Cessna 180 “Spirit of Columbus” 23,000 miles in 29-plus days before landing in Ohio’s capital city on April 17, 1964. On her trip, she made stops in places such as the Azores, Casablanca, Cairo and Calcutta.
