As a child, Lynn Rippelmeyer would ride a horse to the top of a limestone bluff in Illinois and imagine rising on the wind in flight.
After reading “Jonathan Livingston Seagull,” she wrote a letter to author Richard Bach, praising how he perfectly captured the physical and spiritual feeling of flying as she imagined it. She wrote that she wanted to become a pilot.
Richard Bach sent her a check for $100 for her training fund.
In the early 1970s, Lynn began working as a flight attendant. Back then they were called stewardesses and wore go-go boots and hot pants.
“PanAm and TWA were the major airlines and it was the first time you could fly around the world,” she said. “As a flight attendant, I got to see what was called first-class service, which included china and crystal and a seven-course meal that included cold appetizers, hot appetizers, and seven choices of entrees. Since I was the most junior flight attendant, my job was serving the cockpit.”
She immediately discovered why the other stewardesses did not want to serve the pilots. One pilot asked about her bra size to rank the stewardesses. Another pilot enjoyed pulling the breaker on the first-class toilet when a stewardess entered it. After a minute, he’d reset the breaker, which would refill the toilet with a high-pressure jet of water.
Undeterred, Lynn would hike up the stairs to deliver food to the pilots.
“I loved sitting up there looking at the 180° view of the world,” she said. “But to make it comfortable, I’d ask them about flying. The engineer, who was sitting to my right, would draw a wing and explain the Bernoulli principle and the four forces of flight.”
Then came a pilot’s strike. Grounded, Lynn traveled to Antigua and met someone who needed to get his boat from there to Vermont. Lynn volunteered to help crew the boat from Poughkeepsie, New York, through 13 locks on the Hudson River to Lake Champlain, Vermont. The boat owner owned Savage Island on the lake.
“I grew up on a farm in southern Illinois,” she said. “These people owned islands. Savage Island was owned by Ted Riehle, a congressman. Dawn and Bill Hazelett owned the island next to them. They came to the island on a Piper Cub on floats to welcome him home and I met them.”
Bill took Lynn up in the Piper Cub.
“Bill enjoyed scaring young girls by doing stalls and spins,” she recalled. “I assumed he knew what he was doing, and I didn’t get scared. I was having a wonderful time and smiling when I came back down, so his wife, Dawn, offered flying lessons and I couldn’t think of anything better.”
Lynn began flying lessons in that Piper Cub on floats. She continued her training and by 1976, she earned her commercial pilot certificate.
In late 1977, she was part of the first all-female crew on a commercial flight with Captain Emilie Jones for Air Illinois. Grinning, Lynn described the situation as a scheduling error. The executives at Air Illinois were frantic that there wasn’t a man in the cockpit. They demanded that the pilot and co-pilot keep it secret so the passengers wouldn’t panic.
In 1980, Lynn became the first woman to fly the 747 as a first officer at Seaboard World.
In 1984, she was the first female captain on a transoceanic flight. The People’s Express flight from Newark to London’s Gatwick airport made the news. Later that year, Lynn was honored at England’s Woman of the Year ceremony.
In 1988, Lynn and Richard Bach were featured in the BBC Special “Reaching for the Skies, Episode 2: The Adventure of Flight.” In it, Lynn explained how Richard Bach influenced and supported her.
During all this, Lynn had two sons. When she divorced and moved her sons to Houston, she opted to fly the hazardous Houston to Tegucigalpa, Honduras, route for Continental Airlines because it fit her children’s school schedule.
In 2013, Lynn flew her last commercial flight on a Boeing 787 Dreamliner to London.
In retirement, she wrote two books, “Life Takes Wings” and “Life Takes Flight.”
Profits from these books go to support her non-profit Roatan Support Effort (ROSE), which supplies necessities to underprivileged families in Roatan, Honduras.
When Continental Express Captain Aileen Watkins interviewed for a scholarship from the International Society of Women Airline Pilots (ISA), she told the interview panel she was inspired by seeing a female 747 captain in “Reaching for the Skies.”
Lynn was one of the interviewers. She and Aileen have been friends since.
Aileen learned that Lynn’s 50th anniversary of flying was coming up, so she set up a plan to celebrate.
Aileen suggested a flight in a Piper Cub at Jack Brown’s Seaplane Base in Winter Haven, Florida, followed by a flight in a friend’s Cessna 172 to Amelia Island. I met up with Lynn and Aileen at the seaplane base.
Owner and instructor Ben Shipps flew with Lynn. While they were flying, Aileen said she was filing the paperwork for Lynn to be considered for the FAA’s Wright Brothers Master Pilot Award, which is bestowed on pilots with 50 years of safe flying. She planned to file the application on Lynn’s 50th anniversary of flying.
After Lynn and Ben returned, Lynn smiled and said, “It’s amazing how much comes back — the turns, what the picture’s supposed to look like to do a 45° turn to keep the horizon where it is and add a little power. I had to remember about the right rudder. Ben taught me a few things I didn’t have to know on a big lake like Lake Champlain about doing confined area takeoffs and crosswind takeoffs.”
We resumed our interview over lunch at the Flightline Cafe at Winter Haven’s Gilbert Field (KGIF). When asked to compare the changes between when she started flying and today, Lynn sighed.
“I’m glad I got to do it when I did,” she said. “It was a unique chunk of history that I got into at the very beginning and got out just before it got too automated to be fun.”
She then discussed the pilot shortage.
“Pilots are retiring sooner or they’re staying as first officers instead of upgrading to captain for the lifestyle, so you don’t have the experience sometimes in the captain’s seat that would help. There was much more training about what to do if the automation doesn’t work.”
She flies as a passenger from Houston to Honduras regularly to oversee the non-profit, and she noticed that “evidently, they’re being taught to make firm landings. When I was there, you learned how to grease a landing, so the people in the back didn’t even know if you were on the ground or not. In fact, the last time I did that, I got reprimanded. The guy from the training department said, ‘You’re risking the brakes not engaging and the spoilers not engaging if the sensor doesn’t kick in when you touch down.’ That’s the worst excuse for doing a hard landing that I had ever heard.”
Having marked her start and her 50th anniversary of flying in a Piper Cub, Lynn learned that Richard Bach wrote “Jonathan Livingston Seagull” in the house beside Jack Brown’s Seaplane Base.
Lynn plans to attend the 2025 national gathering of the 99s International Organization of Women Pilots. It will be held in Burlington, Vermont, on Lake Champlain. She plans to stay on Savage Island’s new AirBnB and maybe rent a Piper Cub.
