Opal Logan Giberson Kunz was an early American aviator, organizer of women pilots, and persistent advocate for the idea that women who could meet physical standards had both a right and a duty to fly. Born on November 6, 1894, she lost her parents around the age of twelve and was raised by her aunt and uncle, Ed and Margaret Giberson. The family eventually settled in Tarrytown, New York. She attended Dana Hall School in Wellesley, Massachusetts, graduating with the class of 1914, and continued at Pine Manor, finishing in 1915. For a time she returned to Dana Hall as housemother of Selfe House. During the First World War she took part in community and social-service work, including war-bond campaigns, and she lived for a period at the Three Arts Club in New York City, a residence for young women in the arts.
On May 15, 1923, she married Dr. George Frederick Kunz in Tarrytown. Kunz, nearly forty years her senior, was a leading mineralogist and gemologist and vice president of Tiffany and Company from 1879 until his death. A gem variety, kunzite, had been named for him, and he published widely and assembled museum collections. The marriage was annulled on November 21, 1929, yet the two remained on good terms. Opal continued to manage his household and care for him until he died on July 1, 1932. She told the New York Times that they expected to remain friends for the rest of their lives. On his death she received a substantial bequest, reported in some accounts as more than a million dollars, which helped underwrite her flying.
In the late 1920s she took up aviation with the intensity that marked the rest of her public life. She trained at Newark Airport in New Jersey, one of the first women to do so there, and received her pilot’s license on June 7, 1929. Two weeks later she crashed her first airplane; a New York Times headline announced the accident, but she was uninjured. She named her airplanes Betsy Ross. A second machine was christened by Mina Miller Edison, wife of Thomas Edison. She flew for sport and for public demonstration, traveling by air to a summer home, to friends in Pennsylvania, and to meets. She told interviewers that once the human heart decides it wants to fly, nothing on earth can make up for that desire, and she argued that it was the duty of every American woman who could pass the physical tests to learn.
In August 1929, only about two months after she was licensed, she entered the first Women’s Air Derby, the cross-country race later nicknamed the Powder Puff Derby by Will Rogers. At the time the United States had only about seventy licensed women pilots, and roughly forty qualified for the contest. The course ran from Santa Monica, California, to Cleveland, Ohio, over nine days. Race rules limited horsepower to what organizers considered appropriate for a woman. Kunz’s own Travel Air, rated at about 300 horsepower, was ruled too fast for her to handle. Forced to borrow a less powerful airplane, she finished in the middle of the field—accounts place her eighth or ninth—and later wrote that she went through five airplanes before reaching Cleveland. She reflected that the women had done their best but that their performance still did not match the air work of men, a judgment she offered without surrendering the claim that women belonged in the cockpit.
That autumn she helped found the organization that became the Ninety-Nines. An organizational meeting was held on November 2, 1929, at Curtiss Airport in Valley Stream, Long Island. Kunz was a charter member and served as acting president from the founding until 1931, when Amelia Earhart was elected the first official president. In a letter dated December 31, 1929, she rejected the idea that women pilots were in conflict with men. She wrote that the group wanted no militant girl pilots and was not fighting for anything; the aim was to add to what men already contributed. She hoped the club would line up for national defense, so that in floods, fires, or war an efficient corps of women fliers could carry supplies and serve as dispatch pilots. Tiffany, through her husband, designed the Ninety-Nines pin still worn by members.
On April 7, 1930, at the Philadelphia American Legion Benefit Air Meet, she became the first woman to race with men in open competition and won. She also won the Legion’s Aerial Derby in June 1930, beating three men, and a free-for-all at an American Legion meet later that year. The press treated her as a society figure who happened to fly and as a serious competitor. Hazards continued. On September 7, 1930, she loaned an airplane to the aviator John Donaldson at an American Legion meet in Scranton, Pennsylvania; the machine fell from about 1,800 feet and Donaldson was killed. On April 30, 1931, a leaking fuel line poured gasoline onto her face in the cockpit at Washington-Hoover Airport; contemporary accounts credited her with a skillful landing that saved her life, though she suffered burns. In another incident her airplane nosed over, trapping her until ground crew righted it; she was unhurt and gave calm instructions from the cockpit.
Her strongest institutional project was the Betsy Ross Air Corps, a short-lived paramilitary reserve she organized around 1931 and helped fund. Members were to serve as non-combatant pilots—ambulance and transport work, emergency relief—and the corps also aimed to train more women. Kunz was its first commander. George Kunz designed the insignia. She recruited in the East and on the West Coast, where a Newark paper described her organizing California “lady birds.” The group grew to about one hundred members before it disbanded in 1933. It was never formally recognized by the Army Air Corps. She lobbied for a women’s air reserve and kept the argument she had made in 1929: licensed women could be useful in national emergencies without displacing men.
As the Second World War approached she turned to instruction. She taught student pilots at Arkansas State College, then in 1942 moved to Rhode Island and instructed Navy cadets and trainees in the Civilian Pilot Training Program at the state airport. She taught several hundred young men. After the war she worked as an inspector for the Aerojet Corporation in California, near Sacramento, until retirement. In April 1961, after Yuri Gagarin’s orbital flight, she wrote to President John F. Kennedy offering to ride in any government machine that might outdo the Russian record. A courteous reply from the White House thanked her; she was not called. She died at home in Auburn, California, on May 15, 1967, and was buried in Auburn Old Cemetery.
Kunz’s career sat at the edge of the better-known story of Amelia Earhart and the later Women Airforce Service Pilots. She raced, crashed, organized, financed, and taught, and she kept returning to the same practical claim: women who could fly should be counted in the national inventory of pilots. The Ninety-Nines endured. The Betsy Ross Air Corps did not. Her 1961 letter to Kennedy showed that the desire she had described in 1929 had not faded.