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diggAt Lunch with Mary Chance VanScyoc
A conversation with America’s first female air traffic controller
Kim Benson
Justin Folger
VanScyoc (pronounced van-SYKE) is the product of a mechanical-genius father who hung around with a couple of guys who experimented with planes—the overall-wearing Clyde Cessna and executive-type Walter Beech—and a mother who bided her own husband’s pranks (such as rigging up a mechanized dummy to pop out of a coffin during a neighborhood Halloween party).
The Chances lived in Forester Castle in Riverside during the Depression, an unorthodox sanctuary for tomfoolery and fun; boats were built next to a shooting range in the basement. Her father promised VanScyoc and her siblings their own boats if they could swim back and forth across the river 25 times. With a little practice they all succeeded, and received their rewards.
She grew up fearlessly, unhindered by gender stereotypes, an unabashed tomboy who learned to ride motorcycles at 12. The same year, she rode in her first airplane. The pilot was Cessna. “I think my brother and I each paid a dollar to go around in a pea patch,” she recalls. That someone built an airplane out in the barn wasn’t unusual. Perhaps it inspired VanScyoc’s early recurring dream of standing on a sidewalk, flapping her wings, then taking off—a sign of things to come.
Fifteen years ago, VanScyoc received news that she was America’s first female air traffic controller. She realized she was first in Denver, having started her career there in 1942. She never imagined, however, that persistently knocking on a door until a Civil Pilots Training course slot opened would earn her a place in history. Over six years’ time she also worked in towers at Wichita (then, the busiest airport in the country), Hutchinson and Cheyenne, Wyoming.
The only night she was alone at the Wichita tower, September 25, 1945, the hangar caught on fire. What went through her mind? “‘Do your job,’” she recalls. “There was no use calling the fire truck. [The hangar] was on fire. So I closed the field and called Boeing, the city and the airport manager. It didn’t soak in, the number of planes we were losing.” (A total of twenty-seven went up in flames.) “All I could do was watch them burn. It was a sad, sad night.”
A year later out in Cheyenne, she witnessed her first and only major crash: a United DC-4 passenger plane. Coming in under minimums, the pilot made a turn, scraped the wingtip and crashed at the end of the runway. The big blast, she says, looked tragic enough to kill all on board, but only two lives were lost.
To her college classmates, VanScyoc is a member of the women’s rifle team at Wichita University that took first in nationals. A generation of Augustans who went to high school during the 1960s and early ’70s know her as their former P.E. teacher and aviation instructor. An online search, however, positions this Wichitan beside 41 other notable women in world aviation history, along with Sally Ride and Anne Morrow Lindbergh—just two names down from Amelia Earhart.
Everyone assumes Earhart was the reason VanScyoc learned to fly, since the famed female flyer’s disappearance occurred in 1937, shortly before VanScyoc flew the first time. Not so, she says. She simply was an 18-year-old with a friend named Eddy Ottoway who had a forty-horsepower Piper Cub. The film that captured her first solo still exists today—almost seventy years later.
A multi-rated pilot, she eventually logged 1,000 hours, teaching other people how to fly and delivering light planes across the United States. She even married a pilot. “I had a plane and he had a convertible; both wanted what the other had, so we got married,” she says.
When the VanScyocs moved to Augusta, two of her favorite pastimes were within easy reach. “The airfield and the course were right there, so if I wasn’t out playing golf, I was flying.” The expenses of parenting did force her to sell her plane, but didn’t keep her from flying.
Nor did the fact that her son, Gary, had muscular dystrophy slow her down. She and her husband simply loaded him up with their two daughters and took him with them wherever they went, on the ground and up in the air. VanScyoc’s only regret regarding this brave and happy young man who died at age 15 seems to be that he wasn’t able to enjoy a longer life.
At 64, after losing both her son and husband, VanScyoc decided to tackle something new—flying helicopters. “It was the hardest thing I’ve ever done because most of the maneuvers were backward from flying a plane,” she explains. With twenty logged hours in the air, she was flying patterns with her instructor one day when they almost crashed. As the helicopter tilted sharply to one side, the instructor grabbed the stick and recovered at about 200 feet. Later, they discovered that a broken stabilizer bar was the cause of their near-miss.
Hair-raising stories like this (and, of course, her maiden name) explain the title of VanScyoc’s autobiography, “A Lifetime of Chances.” It is available at the Kansas Aviation Museum Gift Shop, where she volunteers her time and shares her story with a new generation of aviation fans. Ironically, above her is the tower she once worked in. “I love it. I feel like this is my building, my field,” she says, pointing to the California section of Wichita Municipal Airport. “It had no runways then, just grass…and whichever way the wind was blowing, you just went into it.”
VanScyoc has lived a full life, dashing headlong into the breeze. Not long ago she celebrated a birthday by roller skating and riding the custom-made Papoose Motorcycle with the sidecar her father made almost seventy-five years ago. Two weeks before our first visit, VanScyoc had a pacemaker put in, but one would never guess this until she relates a recent brush with mortality. “My heart stopped for nine seconds. Then I got the bill and almost had another heart attack!” she says with a laugh.
Even now, sixty years after VanScyoc began her aviation career, women only represent six percent of all pilots, twelve percent of all air traffic controllers and two percent of all helicopter pilots. She truly is a trailblazer of the skies.
