She certainly sounds like she had the pioneering spirit

Jerrie Mock, First Solo Female Pilot to Circumnavigate the Globe, Dies at 88

That summer, Flying magazine asked Ms. Mock why she had undertaken such a treacherous journey alone.

“It was about time a woman did it,” she said.

The first circumnavigation of the globe by a solo flyer is generally credited to Wiley Post, a Texan whose trip, in 1933, began and ended not quite eight days later at Floyd Bennett Field in Brooklyn. Four years later, Earhart, trying to do the same and flying with a navigator, Fred Noonan, disappeared over the Pacific and into legend.

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Ms. Mock was born Geraldine Lois Fredritz on Nov. 22, 1925, in Newark, Ohio. Her father, Timothy, was a power plant executive; her mother, the former Blanche Wright, was distantly related to Orville and Wilbur Wright, the aviation pioneers. When Geraldine was 7 her parents took her to a local airport for a short airplane ride; enthralled, she declared she wanted to be a pilot. She grew up idolizing Earhart.

“I did not conform to what girls did,” she said. “What girls did was boring.”