Jay Honeck wrote:

1. The number of women pictured in the early airplanes. Perhaps they took
photos of the event because it WAS so rare for women to fly, but there are a
good number of them in this archive. (Of course, they're all posed in the
planes on the ground -- maybe they never went aloft?)

With the exception of photo 130, where Bleriot poses with two women passengers,
none of the women in this collection are dressed for flying. The captions state
that they are "posed" in the aircraft. I think it safe to assume that they were
not pilots. It's certain that they didn't go flying anytime soon after the shots
were taken (can you imagine what the sliptream would do to one of those hats?).

This is, indeed, as you say, a priceless discovery.

George Patterson
To a pilot, altitude is like money - it is possible that having too much
could prove embarassing, but having too little is always fatal.