8 March 1910: The First Woman to Receive a Pilot's Licence

The “Baroness” Raymonde de Laroche was born on 22 August 1886 as Elise Raymonde Deroche and was the daughter of a plumber. On becoming an actress and singer as a young woman, Elise Deroche took the stage name of Raymonde de Laroche.

An interest in engineering and flight led de Laroche to take up ballooning. In 1909, at a dinner with Charles Voisin, a pioneer of aviation, she was encouraged to take flying lessons in a fixed-wing aircraft.

Within days de Laroche was confident at the controls of the aircraft, taxiing up and down the airfield. The next stage of her training was to make short hops and, on 22 October 1909, de Laroche left the ground for a distance of 300 yards before landing safely. The following day she flew circuits of the airfield for a total distance of about four miles.

Reporting on these achievements, Flight magazine mistakenly gave her the title of “Baroness” in its article a week later. The title stuck to her for the rest of her life. Her pilot’s licence was awarded by the International Aeronautics Federation (FIA) on 8 March 1910. Licence number 36 was the first awarded to a female pilot.

Appearances at aviation meeting followed. After events in Heliopolis, Saint Petersburg, Budapest and Rouen, de Laroche attended a meeting at Reims. At this event, on 8 July 1910 she suffered serious injuries when her aircraft crashed.

She was not able to fly again for two years. Just after she returned to flying she was injured again, this time in an automobile accident that claimed the life of Charles Voisin. The following year, on 25 November 1913, de Laroche won the Femina Cup for a non-stop flight of over four hours.

During the First World War de Laroche served as a military driver but returned to flying after the armistice. In June 1919 she set the women’s altitude record, at 15,700 feet, and the women’s distance record, at 201 miles.

De Laroche longed to become the first female test pilot and so, on 18 July 1919, she co-piloted a new at Caudron aircraft at the Le Crotoy airfield. After the flight the aircraft went into a dive on its landing approach and crashed killing both de Laroche and pilot.

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