It was on a Wellesley trip to Europe the summer after her junior year that Caroline Harris Baldwin ’61, now an amateur pilot who competed in her 11th Air Race Classic in June, first flew in an airplane.

“It was an overnight flight, and I don’t think I slept at all,” Caroline says. “I spent a lot of time up in the cockpit area with the pilot and copilot. This was back in the days when they let you up there. And I just stood, looking out the window, seeing all the stars.”

Caroline fell in love with air travel and flying on that trip, but it took another 42 years before she would take the wheel and fly herself.

An economics major at Wellesley, Caroline married her high-school sweetheart. His work, first in the Navy and then in international banking, took the couple (and later their three children) all over the world—at one point or another, they called Israel, Luxembourg, and Zimbabwe home. When the family moved back to the States, they settled in New Mexico, which was where, in 2002, Caroline decided to take her first flying lesson at the local airport after her husband won a pair of lessons at a fund-raising event for the local Air Race chapter. The following year, at age 64, Caroline received her pilot’s license.

In 2004, Caroline signed up to fly her Piper Cherokee plane (“I’m short, and it’s smaller [than planes like Cessnas]—I can see over the wheel and can reach the pedals”) in the Air Race Classic, a four-day, women-only race. The race started in 1929 as the Women’s Air Derby, an event organized by pilots including Amelia Earhart at a time when female pilots were banned from competing against men. Today, it covers about 2,400 miles, and includes both professional and amateur pilots. Roughly 50 teams compete each year, and the route changes annually.

“The Air Race, for me, was a way to see the country,” Caroline says of the first several races in which she competed. Soon, however, it also became about family.

In 2009, Caroline’s daughter Lydia, a nurse manager in Fort Collins, Colo., joined her in the plane. Lydia, inspired by her mother’s passion for flying, went on to get her pilot’s license later that year. In 2012, Caroline’s granddaughter Cara, who had just finished her sophomore year of high school, joined them.

“She wasn’t old enough yet to get her pilot’s license, so she sat in the backseat during the race,” Caroline recalls. “She’s a smart girl with wonderful eyesight, and every so often I’d hear her say, ‘Grandma, you’re off course. You need to go a little more to the left.’ It was hilarious, this little girl telling me what to do.”

The trio has continued to race together every year since as the Baldwin Family Flyers, and in June completed their fourth race together, flying from Fredericksburg, Va., to Fairhope, Ala. In 2014, the team was awarded two leg prizes and placed 15th out of the 32 teams who finished the race. This year, Caroline took the back seat and let Cara, a rising junior at Embry–Riddle Aeronautical University, take the wheel.

“I remember as a child during World War II,” Caroline recalls, “being out on the grass and seeing airplanes way up high and thinking, ‘How wonderful it would be to fly and go places.’”