Walking on Air
The Aerial Adventures of Phoebe Omlie
By Janann Sherman
The barnstorming story of the woman pilot second only to Amelia Earhart
Aviation pioneer Phoebe Fairgrave Omlie (1902-1975) was once one of the most famous women in America. In the 1930s, her words and photographs were splashed across the front pages of newspapers across the nation. The press labeled her "second only to Amelia Earhart among America's women pilots," and First Lady Eleanor Roosevelt named her among the "eleven women whose achievements make it safe to say that the world is progressing."
Omlie began her career in the early 1920s when aviation was unregulated and open to those daring enough to take it on, male or female. She earned the first commercial pilot's license issued to a woman and became a successful air racer. During the New Deal, she became the first woman to hold an executive position in federal aeronautics.
In Walking on Air, author Janann Sherman presents a thorough and entertaining biography of Omlie. In 1920, the Des Moines, Iowa native bought herself a Curtiss JN-4D airplane and began learning how to fly and perform stunts with her future husband, pilot Vernon Omlie. She danced the Charleston on the top wing, hung by her teeth below the plane, and performed parachute jumps in the Phoebe Fairgrave Flying Circus.
Using interviews, contemporary newspaper articles, archived radio transcripts, and other archival materials, Janann creates a complex portrait of a daring aviator struggling for recognition in the early days of flight and a detailed examination of how American flying changed over the twentieth century.
Janann, of Memphis, Tennessee, is professor and chair of the history department at the University of Memphis. She has authored several books, including The Perfect 36: Tennessee Delivers Woman Suffrage and No Place for a Woman: A Life of Senator Margaret Chase Smith, and was the editor of Interviews with Betty Friedan, published by University Press of Mississippi.
Published by University Press of Mississippi, 224 pages, 6 x 9 inches, 20 B&W photographs, index, cloth cover
From the Back Cover
 Historians are often detectives, and Phoebe Omlie is lucky indeed that Janann Sherman took on her case. Now Omlie can claim her rightful place in both aviation and women's history. Especially vivid are the depictions of the romance-and danger-of flying in its barnstorming years 
- Susan Ware
author of Still Missing: Amelia Earhart and the Search for Modern Feminism
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