Aviation History – July 21, 1911. The list of victims of aerial locomotion grows with a new name on this Friday, July 21, 1911 and for the first time in the world, it is an aviator, in her thirties, who loses her life, namely Denise Moore, pseudonym of Jane Wright, who is the widow of Mr. Cornesson.
This pilot of French nationality, born in Algeria, died in Etampes, at the Farman aerodrome, as part of a flight that she was making alone at the controls of an airplane. Her inexperience as an aviator, being a student at the Farman school and not yet holding a pilot’s license, undoubtedly played against her. And a badly negotiated turn with her biplane airplane got the better of her… the unfortunate woman crashed after falling 150 feet.
It’s the 68e death to be attributed to aviation, the first having taken place nearly three years earlier: on September 17, 1908, the passenger of the famous air pioneer Orville Wright, the American lieutenant Thomas Selfridge, died following a terrible airplane accident.
