Fay Gillis Wells, 94; Pioneering Female Pilot and Longtime Journalist

Fay Gillis Wells, one of the first female pilots in the world and a journalist who covered the White House during four presidents’ terms, died Dec. 2 of complications from pneumonia. She was 94 and had been hospitalized for six days in Falls Church, Va.

Born in Minneapolis, she was one of three children. Her father was a mining engineer whose career led his family to a life of travel and adventure. From childhood, Gillis and her family lived in countries rarely visited by Americans at the time, including the Soviet Union.

Gillis entered Michigan State Farming University in 1927, the year Charles Lindbergh completed his first solo flight across the Atlantic. Two years later she dropped out of school and earned her pilot’s license. Lindbergh’s flight and the glamorous fame of socialite pilot Amelia Earhart had captured Gillis’ imagination. She moved to New York City and took a job demonstrating and selling planes for Curtiss-Wright Aircraft. There, she met Earhart.

In 1929, Gillis co-founded an aviators club for women and helped persuade Earhart to be the first president. It was called the Ninety-Nines, after the number of charter members. At the time there were 177 female pilots in the country. The club now has about 7,000 members.

Gillis had her first brush with disaster three weeks after she earned her flying license. She was taking a stunt piloting lesson when the plane her instructor was piloting began to disintegrate above Long Island. She parachuted to safety; he had to be hospitalized.

The incident set a course for Gillis’ future. She was invited to join the all-male Caterpillars Club, notching up the status of women among the ranks of skilled pilots. To qualify for membership a person had to have experienced a life-threatening parachute jump from a plane. Beyond that, Gillis’ future husband, Linton Wells, set his sights on her after seeing a news article about her accident.

“My father saw a picture of my mother hanging from a tree and said, ‘That’s the girl for me,’ ” Linton Wells II of Springfield, Va. told The Times this week. Wells is named after his journalist father, a foreign correspondent and aviator, who died in 1977.

Between her first parachute jump in 1929 and her marriage to Linton Wells in 1935, Gillis spend four years in Moscow with her father, who was building zinc plants for the Soviets. She began her career as a journalist in the Soviet Union, writing freelance articles for the New York Herald Tribune and several aviation magazines.

Instead of a honeymoon, the Wellses went to Ethiopia in 1935 to cover the Italian invasion for the Herald. Her choice of Africa required her to turn down an offer from Wiley Post, a record-setting pilot, to accompany him on one leg of his second global flight. Humorist Will Rogers accepted Post’s offer, and both men died when their plane crashed in Alaska.

Wells later described the coincidence as sheer luck.

In Africa the couple befriended the director of the Cairo Zoo, and she adopted a pet leopard and cheetah that she brought to Hollywood in 1936, when she covered the movie industry for the Herald Tribune.

By 1941 the Wellses had returned to Africa as correspondents for the Herald.

When their son was born in 1946, the Wellses had settled in Florida. “My mother took 17 years off to raise me,” Linton Wells II said. The family lived on a houseboat, and young Linton rode a motorboat to school.

In 1963 the Wellses moved to Washington, D.C., when their son entered the U.S. Naval Academy at Annapolis. They worked for Storer Broadcasting Corp., an independent radio and television network. Linton was bureau chief, Fay covered the White House. During the next 13 years she reported on Presidents Johnson, Nixon, Ford and Carter. She was one of three female reporters to accompany Nixon to China in 1972.

After her husband died in 1977, Wells kept up her contacts with female pilots although she had given up piloting in 1960. “Planes got too technological for me,” she told the Kansas City Star in 1998.

She also traveled from home in Arlington, Va., to promote the International Forest of Friendship, a tree-planting project to honor the memory of aviation pioneers. Wells helped establish the project, a park-like setting in Atchison, Kan., near the house where Earhart was born.

She was often invited to speak to elementary school children. “She loved children,” her son said of her. “She’d talk about the early days of flying. To the girls in the class, she’d say there is no limit to what you can do.”

Along with her son, Wells is survived by one brother and two grandsons. Her sister died in 1993. Her ashes will be scattered over the Pacific Ocean, as were her husband’s.

Donations in her memory can be made to the Amelia Earhart Scholarship Fund, c/o Charlene Falkenberg, 618 S. Washington St., Hobart, IN 46342. Or the International Forest of Friendship, P.O. Box 99 AE, Atchison, KS 66002. Contributions should be designated for the Fay Gillis Wells memorial.