Publicity soon propelled Elinor, a blue-eyed, 5-foot-3, curly blond teenager, onto the list of pioneering women in aviation, among them Bobbi Trout, Katherine Stinson, Pancho Barnes , Fay Gillis Wells, Louise McPhetridge Thaden and Amelia Earhart.

On planes provided by corporate sponsors, she began setting records. In January 1929 she set the women’s solo endurance record at 13 ½ hours. Then, three months later she reset it with a 26 ½-hour flight. In 1930, she set the women’s altitude record at 27,419 feet. Within a year, she reset the altitude record at 32,576 feet.

That flight, in a Bellanca monoplane, nearly cost her her life. As The World-Telegram reported on March 11, 1930: “The altimeters on the ship registered 30,000 and 32,000 yesterday when she was forced by motor trouble and waning gas supply to return to Roosevelt Field, where she narrowly averted an accident in making a dead-stick landing. At about 30,000 feet, as the motor sputtered, she lost consciousness. A mile lower she recovered. The plane, without her guiding hand, had glided slowly down.”

In 1934, Miss Smith became the first woman to appear on a Wheaties cereal box.

She was born on Long Island on Aug. 17, 1911, one of three children of Thomas and Agnes Ward. Her husband of 23 years, Patrick H. Sullivan II, who had been a New York State assemblyman, died in 1956. In addition to her son, she is survived by three daughters, Patricia Sullivan, Pamela Sullivan and Kathleen Worden; five grandchildren; and four great-grandchildren.

Miss Smith took a long time off from flying after she married. But nine years ago, at the age of 89, she was invited to the National Aeronautics and Space Administration’s Ames Research Center in Sunnyvale, Calif., where she participated in a simulated landing of the space shuttle.

Always vivid in her memory was that day almost 84 years ago when she first soloed.

She was about to climb into a Farman Pusher biplane, she recalled in an interview for a 1998 PBS documentary, “Daredevils and Dreamers.” She thought it was to be just another flying lesson before she went off to school in Wantagh, a nearby town.

“I was scared silly because Russ” — her teacher — “hadn’t told me I was going to solo that day,” she said on camera. Waving her arm in imitation of her instructor’s direction, she said he suddenly jumped out of the cockpit and simply told her, “Go.”

For a moment she was stunned, then realized that he thought she was ready. “I made three landings,” she said. “Then it was time to go back to Wantagh because I had to go to school.”