Dr Allison O

A tower controller in Columbus watched her plane disappear into the sky and muttered into his radio: "Well, I guess that's the last we'll hear from her." It was March 19, 1964, and Jerrie Mock, a 38-year-old housewife with 750 hours of flight time, was attempting something that had killed Amelia Earhart. Nobody expected her to come back alive. But Geraldine "Jerrie" Mock did come back. Twenty-nine days later, she touched down in Columbus in her Cessna 180, becoming the first woman to fly solo around the world. The crowd that greeted her numbered 5,000. The governor was there. She had done what Earhart could not. What makes this story even more remarkable is how completely she vanished from history. While Earhart's name is spoken in reverence, Mock's achievement was swallowed by time. The press called her "the flying housewife," a diminishing title that somehow made her extraordinary feat seem ordinary. She never sought the spotlight anyway. "The kind of person who can sit in an airplane alone is not the type of person who likes to be continually with other people," she once said. Mock was seven years old when she first flew and knew instantly what she wanted to do with her life. At Ohio State, she was the only woman in aeronautical engineering, and she silenced her male classmates by acing a chemistry exam they all failed. But this was 1945, and a woman's place was not in the sky. She dropped out, married, raised three children, and waited. When boredom finally drove her to mention the idea to her husband, he joked: "Maybe you should just fly around the world." She took him seriously. The flight nearly killed her more than once. She landed at a secret Egyptian military base and was surrounded by armed soldiers. An antenna wire caught fire over the Libyan desert, burning dangerously close to her fuel tank. In Saudi Arabia, a crowd of men refused to believe a woman had piloted the plane until someone climbed up to look in the cockpit and confirm there was no man hiding inside. Jerrie Mock passed away in 2014 at 88, never quite believing her own legend. She had simply wanted, as she said, "to have a little fun in my airplane" and to see the world's oceans, jungles, deserts, and people. She did that. And in doing so, she proved that sometimes the greatest achievements belong to those history forgets. Note there has never been a feature film, biopic, or major documentary about Jerrie Mock or her 1964 flight. Just Saying?