Adrienne Bolland

Adrienne Bolland, born Boland, (25 November 1895 – 18 March 1975) was a French test pilot. She was the first aviator to fly over the Andes between Chile and Argentina. She was later described as "France's most accomplished female aviator", setting a woman's record for loops done in an hour. The French government eventually recognized her with the Legion of Honor and other awards. Since her death, she has been commemorated with a postage stamp of Argentina.

Born into a large family outside Paris, she became a pilot in her twenties to pay off gambling debts. An early crossing of the English Channel led René Caudron, her employer, to send her to South America to demonstrate his planes, where she made her Andes crossing, assisted, she later said, by a tip relayed to her from a medium. Later in her life she became involved in leftist political causes, and eventually became part of the French Resistance during World War II.

Early life

Bolland was born in 1895 in Arcueil, outside Paris, the youngest of seven, to Belgian émigrés. She developed an independent, assertive personality in her childhood, as it was difficult to get her father's attention. In the house she was known as "the little terror."

"No one could change my mind. I kept saying, 'I won't give up," she recalled later. "It served me well in life; I never gave in." As she grew into adulthood, that drive found its outlet in partying and gambling. During a drinking session after losing all her money at the race track, she expressed the desire to be a pilot. A friend present suggested she go work for Caudron, France's first airplane manufacturer. She could learn to fly and get paid, taking care of her financial problems. When she finally took off from Mendoza on 1 April 1921, she had 40 hours of flight time

Bolland's flight was especially challenging. The G.3 could not fly much higher than , well below the range's summits, which reach up to at Aconcagua, South America's highest peak. So, she had to fly between and around them and through valleys, a riskier route than Godoy and her predecessors had chosen. She was called "the goddess of the Andes" by the celebrants, but dismissed the acclaim. "I said to myself: this is glory? It's nothing. Glory isn't worth anything compared to the inner joy of accomplishing something." She continued to fly, setting a women's record of 212 loops tying with ten other pilots, all men, in an 18-flight, race around France the next year.

Later life

In 1930 she married another aviator, Ernest Vinchon. Her combative nature continued to polarize those who knew her; a 1933 accident she survived was later ruled to have been the result of sabotage. and lycée have been named for her in Poissy, a Paris suburb.

In 2005 La Poste, the French postal service, issued a stamp honouring her.

The Paris Tramway T3, which came into operation on 15 December 2012, has nine of the 26 stops named after notable women; the Adrienne Bolland stop is on boulevard Mortier in the 20th arrondissement.

A stamp celebrating the centenary of Bolland's flight crossing the Andes was issued in Argentina in 2021.