Laura Houghtaling Ingalls (December 14, 1893 – January 10,
1967) was a pilot who won the Harmon Trophy. She was arrested in December 1941
and convicted of failing to register as a paid German agent. She had been
receiving approximately $300 a month from Baron Ulrich von Gienanth (Ulrich
Freiherr von Gienanth), the head of the Gestapo in the US, and, officially,
second secretary of the German Embassy in Washington. During the trial it came
out that von Gienanth had encouraged Ingalls's participation in the
non-interventionist America First Committee, a significant embarrassment for
that organization.
Laura Houghtaling Ingalls was a distant cousin of Little
House on the Prairie's Laura Ingalls Wilder, and became a friend of her
daughter Rose Wilder Lane.
Her most well-known flights were made in 1934 and earned her
a Harmon Trophy. Ingalls flew in a Lockheed Air Express from Mexico to
Chile, over the Andes Mountains to Rio de Janeiro, to Cuba and then to Floyd
Bennett Field in New York, marking the first flight over the Andes by an
American woman, the first solo flight around South America in a landplane, the
first flight by a woman from North America to South America, and setting a
woman's distance record of 17,000 miles.
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