Over the years, women have overcome so many obstacles in their desire to sit behind the controls of an aircraft and be masters of the machine’s journey in the skies.
Today the opportunities for women are unlimited, and we now just take it for granted that women are no longer limited to the regulated status of women pilots of the past.
When looking for a female pilot with a compelling story I went looking for that one woman with a moment in history that became legend. Luck and location allowed her to witness the beginning of a world-transforming event.
Cornelia Fort was like so many young women considered rebels in their day, and as I read about her, I recalled Florence “Pancho” Barnes, another debutante who came from wealth. Barnes blazed a trail in those early days of aviation, setting the stage for women aviators like Cornelia.
Dr. Rufus Fort and his wife Louise had brought up their oldest daughter to be the demure wife of a Southern gentleman. Their five children grew up in an opulent 24-room house originally built in 1815.
It stood on 365 acres of land along the Cumberland River in Davidson County, Tenn. A chauffeur drove the children to their exclusive private schools. And after Cornelia turned 19, her father presented her to society in an elaborate debutante ball, attended by hundreds.
But Cornelia had other ideas and a prim and proper life was not in the cards as she looked for greater adventure. The one driving motivation that had her walk away from the glamourous life was the desire to become a pilot.
Around the time of her father’s death in the spring of 1940, Fort took her first flying lesson, and she was instantly addicted. Though she could never quite articulate why she loved planes so much, her sister would later claim that it was quite simple: Cornelia was a great rebel of her time. Within a year Cornelia had become the first female flight instructor in Nashville.
During that time with war clouds forming around the world President Franklin Roosevelt knew there would be a need to have as many pilot instructors as our nation could get, so he opened up to anybody who could teach the art of flying and Cornelia fit that bill to a tee!
Entering the Civilian Pilots Training Program, she took a flight instructor’s job at Fort Collins, Colo. Then in the fall of 1941, she was hired to teach defense workers, soldiers, and sailors to fly in Hawaii. In a letter home to her mother, she wrote: “If I leave here, I will leave the best job that I can have (unless the national emergency creates a still better one), a very pleasant atmosphere, a good salary, but far the best of all are the planes I fly. Big and fast and better suited for advanced flying.”
Little did she know that national emergency was coming her way in the form of Japanese dive bombers and fighters that calm Sunday morning — Dec. 7, 1941. As she took her student up for his last lesson before he soloed, a sleek monoplane appeared, coming straight at her Interstate Cadet; she grabbed the controls and evaded the strange intruder to Hawaii airspace. As she looked to identify the renegade aircraft she watched as a silver object departed the plane and the bursting of a bomb in Pearl Harbor told her that the skies were nowhere to be if this was a full-on attack.
As she made a beeline back to the John Rogers Airport at Pearl, she made a hasty departure from her plane with the student as attacking aircraft strafed the small civilian field. In a blink of an eye, Cornelia had survived the beginning of World War II for America, but the attack provided an opportunity for her to become the pilot she had always dreamed of.
Her first invitation came in a telegram while she was still in Hawaii dated Jan. 24, 1942, from leading female aviator Jackie Cochran. It asked Fort to join a select group of American women who would fly with the Royal Air Force Air Transport Auxiliary in Britain. Fort couldn’t accept the offer because she wasn’t back in the continental U.S. in time, but in the fall of 1942, she was one of a handful of women to receive another invitation.
This time the telegram asked her, “If interested, please report within twenty-four hours to Wilmington, Delaware, for service in the Ferrying Division of the Air Transport Command.”
Fort was more than interested; she was ecstatic. Here was a chance to play an important role in the war effort. In a letter home she wrote, “The heavens have opened up and rained blessings on me. The Army has decided to let women ferry ships and I’m going to be one of them.”
Cornelia flew in the newly established squadron, the Women’s Auxiliary Ferrying Service. WAFs, as they were known, were hired to fly planes from factories to military air bases. They were the first hires who over time would become the very successful W.A.S.P. (Women’s Airforce Service Pilots) program. In the beginning, those pioneer women dealt with many harsh conditions: the weather, navigation, camouflaged air bases, crazy country hopping logistics, and of course egotistical male pilots who felt that women did not belong flying aircraft in any manner, especially for a nation at war.
Of course, Cornelia felt that the only way to show the disbelievers, “the snickering hangar pilots,” she concluded, “is to show them,” and Cornelia and the other female pilots did just that. They were resilient, professional, and as capable as the men of flying any military aircraft they were assigned to. They called in sick less frequently and they maintained a marginally better safety record.
Cornelia was going to be dealt a hard blow to her life and dreams, and only flew for her country for just a few brief months. On March 21, 1943, she was one of a number of pilots, both male and female, who had been assigned to ferry BT-13s to Love Field in Dallas, Texas. During that mission, one of the men’s landing gear clipped Fort’s airplane, sending it plummeting to earth. Fort didn’t have time to parachute to safety.
She was dead at 24, the first female pilot to die in wartime active duty.
Her commanding officer sent a compassionate letter back to the young pilot’s mother: “My feeling about the loss of Cornelia,” wrote Nancy Love, “is hard to put into words — I can only say that I miss her terribly, and loved her. If there can be any comforting thought, it is that she died as she wanted to — in an Army airplane, and in the service of her country.”
In 1945 the young women from Tennessee who came from privilege was honored with a local airport named after her, built near her family’s farm. It closed in 2011, but for many years the pilots coming and going would drive by the monument in front of the facilities at the site that in her own words, simply and modestly sums up her wartime contribution: “I am grateful that my one talent, flying, was useful to my country.”
Although Cornelia Fort lived a very short life, she made an impact on society, helping open the doors for women in the future. It’s a tragedy the generations after her never got the chance to hear her speak or read her story of a long, full life, but we are thankful for the message she championed: that a privileged life may have its benefits, but if that life doesn’t fulfill your rebel spirit and desire for adventure then maybe the privileged life isn’t all it’s cracked up to be.
During this month as we celebrate the many amazing achievements of women in aviation, let’s not forget that it was a young woman from Tennessee, in an unarmed Interstate Cadet, who was the first to see head on the beginning of a war that would open the doors of opportunities for women.
Those opportunities would benefit many women, and at the same time help to end that war. And remember Cornelia Ford who did her very best while feeling proud and earning her the opportunity to serve her country as an American pilot.
