What Happened to the Couple Credited With Starting the Mile High Club?

On a November day in 1916, pilot and inventor Lawrence Sperry climbed into a flying boat with aviator Dorothy Rice Peirce. What happened next became one of the raciest stories in aviation history.

How did their flight end?

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Choose before you read the reveal. Your choice is recorded anonymously.

AThey landed safely while the automatic stabilizer handled the flying.BThey crashed into Great South Bay and, according to aviation lore, were rescued naked by duck hunters.CThey were arrested by aviation authorities.

Choose now. No changing your answer after the reveal.

Sperry was not an ordinary pilot. He was one of the people teaching airplanes to fly without constant help from the person in the cockpit.

Working with his father, inventor Elmer Sperry, he helped develop an automatic gyrostabilizer. Gyroscopes sensed when an aircraft tilted, and mechanical controls corrected its attitude. It was far simpler than a modern autopilot, but it could keep a flying boat straight and level without the pilot continuously wrestling the controls.

That was a remarkable achievement in 1913, only a decade after the Wright brothers' first powered flight.

Lawrence demonstrated the system spectacularly at an aviation safety competition in France on June 18, 1914. According to the Smithsonian National Air and Space Museum, Sperry and his assistant climbed onto the aircraft's wings while the stabilizer kept the machine flying. The empty pilot's seat was part engineering demonstration, part showmanship.

It worked. Sperry won the competition and became famous.

Dorothy Rice Peirce was more than the socialite she is often reduced to in retellings. She was an aviator herself, and contemporary reporting called her an aviatrice. Later accounts describe her as Sperry's student and say the pair took off in her Curtiss flying boat for a short flight over Long Island on November 21, 1916.

The altitude is the first sign that this story needs careful handling. One later account says they were around 500 feet up. Another gives 600 feet. The New York Times subsequently described an 800-foot fall.

Every figure is far short of 5,280 feet, which means aviation's supposed first Mile High Club flight was not actually a mile high.

There is another complication. The most famous version of the story did not appear in the strongest contemporary report we found.

The New York Times wrote about the accident on November 28, 1916. Its article said Peirce had been trapped for more than a minute in mud and wreckage seven feet underwater. She suffered a fractured pelvis and other injuries, but was already giving instructions to have her aircraft repaired. The headline said she considered going into the water with Sperry very funny.

That account confirms a frightening accident. It does not mention why the pair supposedly became famous for something other than flying.

Still confident in your choice?

The answer, with an asterisk

The intended answer is B.

Sperry and Peirce ended up in Great South Bay off Long Island. Later aviation histories say two duck hunters rowed to the wreck and discovered that both occupants were naked. The same accounts say Sperry blamed the crash for removing their clothes, an explanation that must have required the crash to be unusually selective about buttons.

This is the version that earned them their unofficial place as the founding couple of the Mile High Club.

It is also where documented history turns into legend.

The water accident is real. The participants are identifiable. Peirce's injuries were reported at the time. Sperry's connection to automatic flight control is well established.

The naked rescue and its romantic explanation are less secure. They appear repeatedly in later accounts, including Time, The Atlantic and specialist aviation histories, but we did not locate a contemporary source that independently confirms them. Later retellings even disagree about the woman's identity, sometimes incorrectly calling her Cynthia Polk instead of Dorothy Rice Peirce.

The cause of the accident is similarly unsettled. One story says Sperry bumped or disengaged the stabilizer during the couple's airborne activity. Another account attributed to Sperry says they deliberately descended, made a good water landing and then struck a stake that punctured the hull. The contemporary New York Times report does not resolve the disagreement.

So B wins the puzzle, but only in this precise form: the pair crashed into Great South Bay, and the naked duck-hunter rescue is the durable story told about what followed.

That distinction does not ruin the tale. It makes it better. Beneath the wink is a genuine moment from the wild early years of aviation, when an inventor could demonstrate automatic flight by leaving the cockpit, a determined aviator could plan her next flight from a plaster cast, and a 600-foot story could somehow grow into a mile-high legend.