Aeronautics: Jumping Nurse

A few hours after the Hutchinson “flying family” had been picked up on the coast of Greenland last week (see col. 2), a big Wasp-powered Bellanca monoplane lumbered across Floyd Bennett Field, N. Y. and roared off for Italy. It carried

Danish-born Pilot William Ulbrich, 31, Italian-born Dr. Leon Martocci Pisculli, Manhattan gynecologist, and Edna New comer, 28, a pretty, plumpish brunette nurse from Williamsport, Pa. Also aboard was a woodchuck named Tailwind. Announced purpose of the expedition was to permit Dr. Pisculli to study the effects of fatigue on transatlantic flyers. Believing that many ocean flights have ended tragically because of carbon monoxide gas in the cabin, Dr. Pisculli took along Woodchuck Tailwind (more susceptible to the gas than humans) as a safety gauge.

A 53-year-old bachelor, Dr. Pisculli was a founder of the American Nurses’ Aviation Service, organized to serve in time of floods, storms and other disasters. It was as a representative of A. N. A. S. that Nurse Newcomer, a licensed pilot, joined the flight. She expected to spell Pilot Ulbrich on the 40-hour grind to Rome. When the plane passed over Florence, Italy, Nurse Newcomer, who had taken lessons in parachute jumping, planned to bail out as a gesture in honor of First Nurse Florence Nightingale. Dressed in a white riding habit, she carried a dress which she forgot at the last moment and had to climb out of the plane and fetch, explaining: “It would be terrible if I were to be presented to the King and I didn’t have a dress along.”

In Dr. Pisculli’s medical kit were a hypodermic needle, a stethoscope, smelling salts, lamb’s wool and almond oil to stuff in their ears to prevent deafness. In the larder were three roast chickens, a dozen raw eggs, tomatoes, oranges, chocolate bars, tea tablets, honey to sweeten the tea, chewing gum and special aviation biscuits invented by Dr. Pisculli. If the plane were forced down at sea, the party had a three-pound still to distill salt water.

Painted white with yellow wings and re-christened The American Nurse, the Bellanca monoplane was the ship that Hugh Herndon Jr. and Clyde Pangborn flew, by fits & starts, around the world last year. Pilot Pangborn was at the field to see his old ship take off for its second transatlantic hop. After the takeoff. the big white plane was seen over Cape Cod, then 1,200 mi. on its course toward Cape Finisterre by the tanker Winnebago, then 400 mi. from Europe by the S. S. France. And then it was seen no more. On the night that The American Nurse was supposed to have landed in Rome, a total eclipse of the moon darkened the Mediterranean.