an accident when her biplane fell fifty feet. She was able to save herself by holding the biplane level and effecting a pancake landing. Remarkably, the only damage was a broken girder near the engine and a cut to her hand. The mishap did not seem to faze her. In an interview ten days later she explained: On Dec. 2, 1916, Richberg-Hornsby participated in a publicity stunt for the National American Woman Suffrage Association (N.A.W.S.A.). The plan, devised by Carrie Chapman Catt, was for Richberg-Hornsby to fly her biplane over President Woodrow Wilson's yacht, the Mayflower, as it came down the Hudson River toward Liberty Island for the celebration of the first lighting of the Statue of Liberty. Once over the yacht, she was to "bomb" the president with petitions from female voters of the western United States (a demographic that had largely favored Wilson in the recent, narrow 1916 election. She was accompanied by Ida Blair: welfare worker, businesswoman, and N.A.W.S.A. press publicity leader, who later founded the Women's Democratic Union. The biplane was decorated with streamers of yellow, white, and blue, the suffrage campaign colors, and a banner reading "Women Want Liberty Too." Before she could reach the president's yacht, however, the high winds forced Richberg-Hornsby to make an emergency landing in a Staten Island swamp. According to the New York Sun, the biplane was "broken winged," although Richberg-Hornsby and Blair suffered only "a few mundane bumps." Around the same time, Richberg-Hornsby announced her intention of flying to Palm Beach, Florida, in hopes of breaking the American distance record then held by Ruth Law. Once in Palm Beach, she stated, she would start a flight school for women that would offer instruction in military observation. Neither of these plans was realized. WWI and beyond In November 1916, Richberg-Hornsby earned a commission as Lieutenant in the U.S. Aviation Reserve Corps, organized by Albert Bond Lambert. She subsequently tried to join the U.S. Flying Corps in France, but the French government refused to accept a woman. A second attempt, following America's entry into the war, met with the same response. In 1917, she was one of the "silent sentinels" who picketed the White House under the organization of the National Woman's Party, and on November 14, she was among the thirty-three women arrested and imprisoned in the Occoquan Workhouse in Virginia. Many of these women were subjected to brutal treatment,