[X] Ditching
[X] Aircraft Identification
Maria Dubois was born on April 15th, 1893, in Manhattan, New York State. Her father, Mathias, arrived in the United States as a four year old in 1872: her grandparents were farmers in Lorraine, and left the region with nothing rather than become German citizens in 1871, eventually immigrating to America. Her mother was a more recent immigrant, arriving in 1888 after her father lost his job during labour strikes.
As a child, her father worked in a paint factory while her mother would work stints in a textile mill. Her uncle Hector, a quiet and studious man, made a good living as an accountant and married a woman even better off than he, one of the first female lawyers in the United States. This inspired her parents to push her and her brother toward pursuing the best education they could. Maria, who never seemed to stand out particularly, was hardly the best student, but stuck through secondary education, making a number of friends of slightly higher social status while most of her working class friends began jobs and got married.
Her closest friend, Harriet Byrne, was something of a prodigy, and applied to Vassar College upon graduating, securing one of the school's prized academic scholarships. Unsure what to do with herself, Maria did the same, and by some stroke of luck squeaked out an acceptance. Originally planning to pay her way through a mixture of her parent's enthusiasm for her educational pursuits and whatever odd jobs she could find, her aunt and uncle's intervention allowed her to focus on her studies. She learned French, primarily to be able to speak to her grandparents in the language, and found a fascination for maps, geology, the work of Dr. Florence Bascom, and the history of the Earth.
Following graduation, she wrote letters to former students of Dr. Bascom, and through these contacts secured a job at the United States Geological Survey. Originally hired on a temporary basis to help bring maps of the Adirondacks to modern standards, she was well-liked by the senior geologist on the site and secured another position in Montana, a job that consisted largely of camping out in the woods with ledgers and ink. She grew fairly used to rough living among men, sometimes spending weeks at a time far from any modern amenities.
This was also where she first crossdressed. Rural Montana's demographics had been heavily warped by the collapse of the homestead farms in the 1890s, with a much higher proportion of men than women. In some of the most remote places she worked, she was the only single woman they'd seen in months. To ward off harassment and focus on her work, she began wearing men's clothes whenever the survey team had cause to go into town, and found the freedom of it invigorating.
When she returned to New York City in December 1915 after nearly a year mostly isolated from the news in Europe, the picture overseas looked grim. Her mother still exchanged letters with her sister in Paris, and from this Maria learned she'd lost a cousin to poison gas at Ypres and another at the Second Battle of Artois. She also learned that American volunteers were being taken by the French Army to fly aircraft, and having seen a demonstration of a Wright airplane demonstrated as a potential tool for surveying land and already contemplating piloting lessons, she began to form a plan.
She sought out and hired a woman by the name of Ruth Law to teach her to fly, learning on Law's Curtiss Model D. She also had a passport forged as
Martin Dubois and boarded a steamer for France, arriving in June 1916 dressed in men's clothing and in possession of a pilot's license. What she thought would be the greatest hurdle, the Army physical, turned out to be no issue at all: a doctor took one look at her, fully dressed, asked how she was feeling between puffs on his pipe, inquired as to if she did much work outside, then shrugged and waved her through.
Training was from there a short affair. Already demonstrably a capable pilot, she took quickly to gunnery training and acclimatized well on the Nieuport 10 used for training. She struggled sometimes with situational awareness, but it was hardly something her instructors noticed. Cautious of being exposed, she made no friends in training and missed out on much of the informal advice being passed around for what to do in a crash.
On July 7th, 1916, she got her orders: she was given the rank of Sergeant in Escadrille 148, a squadron consisting of a mix of American volunteers and French aviators. It seemed that there were so many American volunteers that they were posting them to squadrons other than 124. She would take a train the next day to the line, where a car took her to the areodrome, a small field located next to a series of abandoned farmhouses being used as a billet. Hasty tents out in the field covered the squadron's aircraft, and she was directed to 'claim a spot' in one of the houses, settling on a disused pantry for the privacy.
The next morning, she was told, she would get to fly.
---
Escadrille 148 operates a mix of pursuit planes. What is Maria assigned?
[ ] A Nieuport 17, a light, highly manoeuvrable rotary-engine pursuit aircraft. It's nimble and climbs like a cork, but has fragility problems.
[ ] A SPAD S.VII, a heavy V-engined fighter with an impressive top speed. However, it's heavy on the controls and has poor visibility.
[ ] A Nieuport 11, an earlier version of the Nieuport 17 still being phased out. Slower and less well-armed, its only advantage is that it is even lighter and more manoeuvrable.