Her father was a member of the New York Stock Exchange, and had served with Teddy Roosevelt's Rough Riders (officially known as The 1st United States Volunteer Cavalry).

She first achieved public fame in January 1928, as co-pilot for Harry Rogers, who had been her flying instructor, on the first non-stop flight from New York to Miami, Florida.

[2] In June, 1931, she attempted to become the first woman to fly solo across the Atlantic Ocean, but crashed in New Brunswick[3] and was severely injured, breaking at least two vertebrae in her back.

On 14 February 1932, Nichols set a new world altitude record of 19,928 feet for diesel-powered aircraft at Floyd Bennett Field, NY while flying in a Lockheed Vega.

On 3 November, an attempt at breaking Earhart's transcontinental record failed when Nichols' aircraft skidded off the runway at Floyd Bennett Field while taxiing, went into a ground loop, and was badly damaged as the port wing dug in, although the pilot escaped injury.

The flight was to be an airborne wedding for two couples over New York City, but the plane, a Curtiss Condor, registration NC725K, crashed shortly after takeoff, killing the pilot.

Nichols received a broken left wrist, ankle and nose, contusions, burns and "possible internal injuries", according to newspaper accounts of the crash.

During this tour, on August 14, she joined the crew of a Transocean Air Lines flight carrying 47 Italian immigrants on behalf of the International Refugee Organization to Caracas, Venezuela.

In 1959, as NASA's Mercury program was preparing for missions to the moon, Nichols underwent the same isolation, centrifuge, and weightlessness tests that had been devised for the astronaut candidates.

Flickinger, and his mentor Randy Lovelace (the bioastronautics pioneer who performed the medical selection of the Mercury Seven), had a far-reaching interest in research on the suitability of women as astronauts.