WHAT’S HAPPENING // Fall Section Meeting · Fishers · October 2–4 · we’re hosting
SINCE 1929
About the Indiana Chapter
We’re one of fifteen chapters in the North Central Section of The Ninety-Nines, based in central Indiana — forty-odd members flying everything from a 1946 Cub to a 737. This year we’re hosting the Section’s fall meeting, and awarding five scholarships with Republic Airways.
What we do
We meet
Monthly, at airports around the state, usually on a Monday. See the calendar.
We fund flying
This year, with Republic Airways, we’re awarding five $1,000 scholarships — from a first certificate through a CFII. See scholarships.
We host
In October the North Central Section’s fall meeting comes to Fishers, and the Indiana Chapter is running it. Fifteen chapters, three days. See the schedule.
Amelia Earhart worked here
The Ninety-Nines was founded in 1929 by 99 women pilots, and Amelia Earhart was its first president. From 1935 she was also on the faculty at Purdue, advising the aeronautics department and counseling women on their careers.
The Purdue Research Foundation bought the Lockheed Electra she called her Flying Laboratory — the airplane she was flying on her last flight. There’s a statue of her on campus, and the terminal at Purdue Airport carries her name.
We fly out of the state where the first Ninety-Nine went to work. That isn’t a small thing to us.
Indiana aviation
Indiana has been building airplane engines for more than a century. Allison started as a machine shop serving the Indianapolis Motor Speedway, then built the V-1710 that powered the P-38, P-39 and P-40 — tens of thousands of them, from plants here in Indianapolis. Rolls-Royce bought Allison in 1995 and still builds engines on the same ground.
Republic Airways is headquartered in Indianapolis, runs its LIFT Academy flight school in Carmel, and funds all five of our scholarships.
Indiana women who flew
Margaret Ringenberg of Fort Wayne ferried aircraft as a WASP during the war, then came home, taught people to fly, and started racing in 1957. She logged more than 40,000 hours. She flew the Air Race Classic at 87 and finished third, a month before she died.
Marty Wyall, also of Fort Wayne, was a WASP too. At a Ninety-Nines convention in 1964 she gathered eighty-six of them in one room and asked them to keep meeting — which is how WASP reunions began. She kept their records for decades afterward.
Both are in the Indiana Aviation Hall of Fame. Both were Ninety-Nines.
The Ninety-Nines has had an official song since 1941. Dick Ballou wrote it, and the membership voted to adopt it at the annual business meeting in Albuquerque on 5 July 1941 — a few months before most of the women singing it would be flying for the war effort.
We sing it at the holiday gathering every December, with more enthusiasm than accuracy.
