Aviation pioneer, and longtime Greenwich resident, Gloria W. Heath, passed on peacefully at her home on Saturday, December 16, 2017. She was 95. Gloria was born in New York City to Royal Vale and Lillian Hart Heath. She graduated from the Putney School in Vermont in 1939, and Smith College in 1943, where she was a competitive and dedicated 3–sport athlete, playing basketball, ice hockey, and lacrosse as an undergraduate at Smith. She went on to compete nationally and internationally in Women’s Lacrosse. In 1951, she traveled to Great Britain as a member of the touring team. Gloria also served as President of the U.S. Women’s Lacrosse Association, and she was inducted into the Inaugural Class of the Smith College Pioneer Athletic Hall of fame in 1971. In 2006, she was inducted into the National Lacrosse Hall of Fame.
While Gloria was at Smith College, her older brother, Royal, encouraged her to fly. He was taking flying lessons at the time, and had his instructor take her up in a plane. Her love for flying was so great, that she encouraged 14 other women attending Smith College to take flying lessons also, and they all bought a plane together. Eventually Gloria founded the Smith College Flying Club, and by the time she graduated in 1943, she had obtained her pilot’s license.
Upon graduating from Smith College, Gloria joined the Women’s Airforce Service Pilots or WASPs, and flew the B-26 bomber during the war years. Gloria’s love for flying, and desire to serve her country during a critical time, outweighed the many dangers she faced flying planes towing targets behind them that were used for target practice at Grissom Air Reserve Base in Indiana and other air bases in Idaho.
At the end of WWII, she began working in the field of Aviation safety, becoming a founding member of the Flight Safety Foundation, a nonprofit organization which encourages aviation safety around the world. Gloria also wrote a manual for pilots instructing them on how to ditch a plane in the water with the least damage to the plane. Her devotion to flight safety spanned more than two decades. In 1965 she became the assistant director to the Cornell-Guggenheim Safety Center, and in 1968 she founded her own search and rescue consulting company, SAR-ASSIST. She was an innovator, and she became a major contributor to the development of the satellite-based search and rescue system.
In recognition of her significant contributions to flight safety, she received the Amelia Earhart Award in 1957 and was awarded the Laura Tabor Barbour International Air Safety Award in 1965. Gloria was listed as one of the 100 most influential women in aviation in 2001 by Women in Aviation International, and in 2010 she was awarded The Congressional Gold Medal for her wartime service. Also in 2010, Greenwich, Connecticut’s First Selectman, Peter Tesei, issued a proclamation making May 11 Gloria W. Heath Day in Greenwich.
Although Gloria’s life had been filled with outstanding accomplishments, she remained a humble, and deeply caring and giving individual, who sought only to help others. She was predeceased by her brother, Royal Vale Heath, Jr., and is survived and will be greatly missed, by all her beloved friends who feel very blessed to have known her and to have shared in different parts of her life journey. She will remain an inspiration to young women as a pioneer for women in aviation.
Funeral arrangements were conducted privately by Coxe & Graziano Funeral Home, 134 Hamilton Avenue, Greenwich. Memorial donations in her name may be directed to First Church of Christ, Scientist, Greenwich, 11 Park Place, Greenwich, CT. 06830
