The Pearson Air Museum at Fort Vancouver National Historic Site in Vancouver Washington, looks at the history of aviation at Pearson Field which began as a military airfield. One of the planes exhibited in this small museum is Leah Hing’s 1931 Fleet Model 7.
Reuben Fleet designed this aircraft in 1928 for the Consolidated Aircraft Company. The original design went through several improvements and only 48 of the model 7 with the Kenner B-5 engine—a radial 125 hp 5-cylinder engine—were sold in the United States. It has a top speed of 115 mph, a cruising speed of 87 mph, and a service ceiling of 14,000 feet.
“Leah Hing was born in 1907 in Portland, Oregon. Her parents were Lee Hing, an herbalist and farmer who owned a medicine and tea store, and Ah Sin Hing. While her father, Lee, had also been born in Oregon to Chinese parents, Hing's mother had immigrated to the United States from Canton, China, around 1901. In 1912, the family moved to a house in the Ladd's Addition neighborhood of Portland. Hing lived there her entire life. Ladd's Addition was one of the few parts of the city where Chinese and other Asians, along with Italians, were able to buy homes prior to World War II. Even there, however, Chinese would-be homebuyers faced discrimination, and often had to use a white person as a front to purchase the house, then later transfer the title to the Chinese buyer.
Growing up Portland’s vibrant Chinese community, Hing was active in a variety of social organizations. Newspaper articles from the 1920s reveal her leadership in the Chinese Girls’ Club as president, member of the Campfire Girls, and the team manager of a basketball team for Chinese women, the Chung Wah, whose games raised money to support elderly and financially struggling Chinese Portlanders. She participated in many of these activities with her childhood companion Lillian Lang, who later became her life-long partner. In 1927, as a student at Washington High School, Hing started a band called the Portland Chinese Girls' Orchestra. Hing played the saxophone. After graduation, the band joined "Honorable Wu's" vaudeville troupe and toured the United States and Canada. Their signature song on this Depression-era tour was "Happy Days are Here Again." Several band members, such as Hazel Ying Lee and Virginia Wong, also became aviators.
While playing in Chicago, Hing took her first airplane ride at a school for Chinese-American aviators. Soon after, she returned to Portland to work as a cashier in her father's restaurant, the Chinese Tea Garden, but was determined to become a pilot.
In 1932, Chinese immigrant Katherine Sui Fun Cheung began training as a pilot with the Chinese Aeronautical Association in Los Angeles. Later that year, she received her pilot's license and became the first female Chinese American pilot. Cheung became a well-known aerobatic pilot, performing spiral dives, inverted flying, and rolls. She told the audiences who came to watch her fly, "I don't see why a Chinese woman can't be as good a pilot as anyone else...We drive automobiles. Why not fly planes?"
During the early 1930s, Chinese Americans across the nation joined Cheung in the skies, driven by a desire both to fly and aid the country of their parents and grandparents. In 1931, Imperial Japan invaded the Manchuria region of China and quickly overpowered the fledging Chinese air force. Concerned Chinese communities across the United States mobilized to train military pilots and send them overseas. In Portland, prominent Chinese Portlanders founded in the Chinese Flying Club, which recruited local Chinese Americans interested in aviation and furnished them with resources and training through the Adcox School of Aviation. The school trained thirty-six pilots over two terms, and twenty-five traveled to China to serve from 1932 to 1933. Although Leah Hing did not train there at her father’s insistence, two of her childhood acquaintances and former band members, Hazel Ying Lee and Virginia Wong, graduated from the Adcox School and went overseas.
Also in 1932, as Cheung was beginning her rise to fame in California and Chinese Americans in Portland began to train to go overseas, Tex Rankin, a national figure in the world of aviation, ate at the Chinese Tea Garden and met Leah Hing. John Gilbert "Tex" Rankin started a flying school in Portland in 1923 but moved his operations to Pearson Field for the years 1924 through 1926. Rankin's school taught many early Northwest pilots. Rankin suggested that Hing should "take up flying," and Hing agreed. In a 1980 interview, Hing stated that "there was no antagonism against women pilots, for Rankin taught many women." One of Rankin's most famous students, Dorothy Hester, was an aerobatic pilot known as "Princess Kick a Hole in the Sky." Mary Riddle, a pilot and parachutist who became the second Native American woman to earn a pilot’s license, also studied with Rankin.
Although Rankin may have welcomed female aviators, many women still faced opposition from some male pilots and trainers, who believed that they lacked the endurance and talent necessary to fly. Writing in the Oregonian on September 20th, 1936, Portland aviator Bessie Halladay recounted stories of instructors who mandated that female students complete more training hours than their male counterparts out of a fear that they were more likely to go “haywire” when allowed to pilot solo. While Halladay stated that many in the aviation field believed that women were “physically and emotionally unsuited” to become pilots, her article profiled the growing community of women, including Hing and Hester, whose flying careers disproved such ideas.
Hing started her lessons at Rankin's tiny airfield in the Vanport section of Portland. She also passed a written test based on ground and navigation requirements. According to Rankin, Hing was a natural. He stated, "She did everything right. That's unusual for the first time for anyone."
As she worked towards earning her pilot's license, Leah Hing trained with various biplanes. After obtaining her license, in 1936 she purchased a 1931 Fleet Model 2 (later modified to a Model 7) from the Chinese Flying Club of Portland, who had previously used it to train Chinese pilots like those at the Adcox School. However, in 1936, while Hing’s unoccupied aircraft was parked at Pearson Field, Washington Highways Director and plane hobbyist Lacey V. Murrow accidentally taxied his plane into Hing's, causing her plane to catch fire. The damage amounted to $500. Hing sold the plane to Murrow and purchased a more capable Travel Air biplane from fellow female aviator Dorothy Hester. Over the years leading up to World War II, she housed her planes in a hangar at Pearson Field.
In 1939, she joined The Ninety-Nines, an organization for women aviators founded by Amelia Earhart, and two years later, became the secretary-treasurer for the group's Northwest chapter.
With the advent of World War II, Hing, along with other private plane owners, was directed to either sell or dismantle her plane to assist the war effort. She sold her aircraft, but continued her time in aviation, working with the West Coast Civil Air Patrol to do ground training and helped in the repair of navigational instrument equipment at the Portland Air Base.”
