Fay Gillis Wells

American aviator

Fay Gillis Wells (October 15, 1908 – December 2, 2002) was an American pioneer aviator, globe-trotting journalist and a broadcaster.In 1929, she became one of the first women pilots to bail out of an airplane to save her life and helped found the Ninety-Nines, the international organization of licensed women pilots.

As a journalist she corresponded from the Soviet Union in the 1930s, covered wars and pioneered overseas radio broadcasting with her husband, the reporter Linton Wells, and was a White House correspondent from 1963 to 1977.

During the 1930s and 40s she and her husband carried out sensitive government missions, including being "sent by President Franklin D.

Roosevelt on a top secret mission to Africa to look for possible postwar homelands for Jews", according to her obituary in The New York Times.

For many years she actively promoted world friendship through flying.

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