Fay Gillis Wells
American aviator / From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
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Fay Gillis Wells (October 15, 1908 – December 2, 2002) was an American pioneer aviator, globe-trotting journalist and a broadcaster.[1]
In 1929, she became one of the first women pilots to bail out of an airplane to save her life[2][3] and helped found the Ninety-Nines, the international organization of licensed women pilots. As a journalist she corresponded from the Soviet Union in the 1930s, covered wars and pioneered overseas radio broadcasting with her husband, the reporter Linton Wells, and was a White House correspondent from 1963 to 1977.
During the 1930s and 40s she and her husband carried out sensitive government missions, including being "sent by President Franklin D. Roosevelt on a top secret mission to Africa to look for possible postwar homelands for Jews", according to her obituary in The New York Times.[4] For many years she actively promoted world friendship through flying.