May Assheton Harbord
first woman to obtain an Aeronaut's Certificate in the United Kingdom
May Constance Assheton Harbord (6 June 1866 – 7 February 1928), was the first woman to obtain an Aeronaut's Certificate in the United Kingdom, in 1912.
Family
May Constance Cuningham was born in Shimla, India on 6 June 1866, the daughter of James Macnab Cuningham and his wife Mary Falconer McRae (d.1883). Her father was Surgeon General in the Indian Medical Service.
She married the Melbourne based Arthur Blackwood in 1885 though he left her a widow. She was known as May Blackwood during this time. She went on to marry Hon. Assheton Edward Harbord, son of Charles Harbord, 5th Baron Suffield on 3 April 1905.
Ballooning
Mrs Assheton Harbord made her name as a balloonist and aeronaut after a social trip in a balloon in May 1906. She went on to become a regular adventurer in balloons, crossing the English Channel repeatedly. One trip ended with her being thrown out of the balloon on landing due to rough weather, following which she declared that "I can claim, therefore to be the only woman who has landed on the Continent on her head".
This brief starts where responsible research should: with the source description of “May Assheton Harbord” as first woman to obtain an Aeronaut's Certificate in the United Kingdom. Everything that follows is an evidence route, not borrowed authority.
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Vocabulary and entity names are the principal evidence signals here, because they determine the precision of every later search. The source revision retrieved here is dated Feb 7, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q75918250. None of the 0 selected statements returned an explicit reference. The first chronological checks are 1866, 1928, 1912 and 1883.
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This entry incorporates text from “May Assheton Harbord” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.