The Story of Georgia “Tiny” Broadwick, the First Woman to Parachute From an Airplane

Georgia Ann Thompson Broadwick (1893–1978) was an American pioneering parachutist and the inventor of the ripcord. She was the first woman to jump from an airplane, and the first person to jump from a seaplane. Georgia was given the nickname “Tiny” due to her small size, as she weighed only 85 pounds (39 kg) and was 4 feet 8 inches (1.42 m) tall.

At age 15, she saw Charles Broadwick’s World Famous Aeronauts parachute from a hot air balloon and decided to join the traveling troupe. She later became Broadwick’s adopted daughter. Although she would eventually make her jumps from an airplane, in her earlier career she was jumping from balloons. Billed as “the doll girl,” Tiny began performing aerial skydives and stunts while wearing a “life preserver” designed by her adopted father.

On December 28, 1908, Tiny made her very first jump out of a hot air balloon. The skydiving family traveled around and performed at fairs, carnivals, and parks. The appeal of the Broadwick Flying troupe, according to Tiny, was that “it was a very neat and fast act.”

Among her many other achievements, she was the first woman to parachute from an airplane, which she is sometimes credited with accomplishing over Los Angeles on June 21, 1913, with aviator Glenn L. Martin as the pilot. However, she previously made at least two jumps from Martin’s plane during an exhibition in Chicago’s Grant Park the week of September 16, 1912. These early jumps included a well-publicized jump on January 9, 1914, from a plane built and piloted by Martin, 1,000 feet over Griffith Park in Los Angeles.

In 1914, she demonstrated parachutes to the U.S. Army, which at the time had a small, hazardous fleet of aircraft. The Army, reluctant at first to adopt the parachute, watched as Tiny Broadwick dropped from the sky. On her fourth demonstration jump, the static line became entangled in the tail assembly of the aircraft; Broadwick was able to retrieve a knife from her suit and cut the line. Still holding the line, she was able to pull it and open the parachute after falling free from the empennage. Using this knowledge, on her next jump she cut the static line short and did not attach it to the plane. Instead, she deployed her chute manually by pulling the shortened, unattached line while in free-fall in what may have been the first planned free-fall jump from an airplane. This demonstrated that pilots could safely escape aircraft by using what was later called a ripcord.

Also in 1914, Broadwick jumped into Lake Michigan, becoming the first woman to parachute into a body of water.

By the time of her retirement from jumping in 1922 due to problems with her ankles, she was said to have made over 1,100 jumps. Although she was not a pilot, she was one of the few female members of the Early Birds of Aviation.