Women in Aviation History: Jackie Cochran
The following is an excerpt from Flying for her Country: The American and Soviet Women Military Pilots of World War II, by Amy Goodpaster Strebe, published in 2007 (with author’s permission):
“In the 1930s, a pilot by the name of Jacqueline Cochran became known for her outstanding achievements in the field of aviation. Born Bessie Mae Pittman on May 11, 1905, near Muscogee Florida, Cochran exhibited a tremendous drive to succeed and was determined to overcome a childhood fraught with poverty. An orphan, she reportedly did not own a pair of shoes until she was eight years old. Cochran would later write of herself, ‘I might have been born in a hovel, but I was determined to travel with the wind and the stars.’
Always looking to reinvent herself, Cochran reportedly picked her new name out of the telephone directory. In her mid-20s, she moved to New York City to work at an upscale beauty salon called Antoine’s inside Saks Fifth Avenue and to start her own cosmetics business. At a party, she met millionaire businessman Floyd Odlum to whom she confided her dreams and aspirations. The young Jackie mesmerized him, and on May 10, 1936, the two married. Before tying the knot, Odlum suggested to Cochran that she take flying lessons so she could get around the country faster, selling her cosmetics. Cochran took his advice and earned her pilot’s license in only two-and-a-half weeks. In her autobiography, Cochran described her first flying lesson in 1932: ‘I showed up at Roosevelt Field, Long Island, at the flying school. At that moment, when I paid for my first lesson, a beauty operator ceased to exist and an aviator was born.’
Cochran went on to set more speed, distance, and altitude records than any other pilot of her time, male or female—even more than her friend Amelia Earhart, whom she met in 1935 when the two competed in the Bendix Trophy Race, which two years before, had been open only to men. Neither woman won in 1935. But in 1938, Jackie won first prize, beating every man in the race.
On December 4, 1937, Cochran set a new national transcontinental record—beating Howard Hughes’ earlier accomplishments—by racing from New York City to Miami in only four hours and twelve minutes. The flight was a dangerous one, but taking risks became Cochran’s hallmark. That same year the International League of Aviators voted Cochran the world’s outstanding pilot, and award that she went on to win for three consecutive years.
In March 1939, Cochran won her second Harmon Trophy, the highest award given to any aviator in America. The day before the Harmon Award was announced, she had broken a women’s altitude record by climbing to 33,000 feet above sea level. Over the next few months Cochran broke two women’s records and two national speed records, and one intercity record between Burbank and San Francisco. On each of her record-breaking flights, sustained only with a half-filled bottle of Coca-Cola (a full one would explode at high altitudes) and a fistful of lollipops for ‘dry mouth,’ she tested new types of oxygen masks, engine superchargers, sparkplugs, airplane fuel, and wing designs, which would soon appear in America’s air arsenal.”
You can read about how Jackie Cochran led the effort to establish the Women Air Service Pilots in WWII, and how, post-war, she continued to break aviation records, in Flying for her Country. You can also learn about her role in the early NASA testing of women for the space program in The Mercury Thirteen: The True Story of Thirteen Women and the Dream of Spaceflight, Almost Astronauts: 13 Women Who Dared to Dream, and Fighting for Space: Two Pilots and their Historic Battle for Female Spaceflight