How did Harriet Quimby die?

Answer 1

37-year-old Harriet Quimby died on July 1, 1912, while participating in an air show at the Harvard airfield in Squanum, Massachusetts, near Boston. She had been planning to conduct an airmail flight from Boston to New York the next day, which would have been the first airmail flight performed by a woman in American (if not world) history. On the afternoon of July 1, she agreed to take the show's manager, William Willard, up for a flight around the harbor. They boarded Quimby's Bleriot XI monoplane - the same plane in which she'd conducted her famous crossing of the English Channel several months previously - and took off. Everything was going perfectly until they approached the airfield to land.

While the plane was still at an altitude of 1,000 feet, something catastrophic went wrong - the exact nature is still disputed among aviation historians and safety experts (ironically, Quimby was herself an early advocate of aviation safety) - and the plane suddenly went into a steep upward angle. Willard was thrown clear and fell to his death. Quimby tried to regain control of the plane and nearly succeeded, but the Bleriot, which was by the standards of its day a high-performance aircraft, and a highly unforgiving one to fly at that, refused to cooperate, going nearly perpendicular again, and Harriet Quimby fell out of the cockpit to the horror of thousands of spectators, falling to her own death in the shallow, muddy waters near the shore. One of the most widely held theories about the tragic accident is that while both she and Willard (contrary to some claims) had been strapped into their seats, Willard unstrapped his seat, possibly to touch Quimby on the shoulder to get her attention about something, and his motion and weight (he weighed 190 lbs.) caused the poorly-balanced Bleriot to go out of control, flinging him out of his seat. Some authorities say that Quimby unstrapped herself in an attempt to rescue Willard, so that she wasn't secured when she unsuccessfully attempted to regain control of the plane.

Her body and that of Willard were quickly retrieved and resuscitation attempts were performed, but to no avail; both of them suffered multiple broken bones and severe injuries, almost certainly having died instantaneously on impact with the water. Quimby's funeral was held on the evening of Independence Day 1912, three days later, and her body was first buried in a local cemetery in Boston before being moved the next year to a New York-area cemetery.