People & Places

Many women have benefited in their flying careers from ground broken by Jackie Cochran. One of those women, Dryden Chief Engineer Marta Bohn-Meyer, alights from the cockpit of an SR-71 on Oct. 3, 1991, after her first triple-sonic flight. Bohn-Meyer is the first female crewmember of a Blackbird and the second woman ever to fly at triple-sonic spee. A congresswoman took a VIP guest ride in 1985. NASA Photo

Cochran inspires generations of female aviators

Sarah Merlin
X-Press Assistant Editor

When the topic turns to women pilots, the first name that comes to most minds is Amelia Earhart, whose untimely end in 1937 at a young age and at the peak of a celebrated career cemented the mythic status tragedy always bestows.

But Earhart's friend Jackie Cochran, less well known than her ill-fated contemporary, made her name in the annals of aviation after fortune granted her the longevity Earhart was denied. Cochran survived years of adventure in high-speed flight test and marked many aviation milestones before her death in 1980 - at an age nobody can really be sure of, owing to the murkiness of details known about her early life.

Born near Pensacola, Fla., sometime around 1906 and raised by a foster family, Jacqueline "Jackie" Cochran remembered going without shoes until age 8 and wearing dresses made from flour sacks. She gave herself the name Jacqueline Cochran after picking it out of a phone book. She was hired to work in a beauty shop while still a child, and by age 13 was cutting hair professionally. Not long after, she became one of the first women to master a new technique called the permanent wave.

It was a pattern of perseverance and achievement that was to mark the rest of her life. "I might have been born in a hovel," Cochran is quoted as having said, "but I was determined to travel with the wind and the stars."

And in forty years in the cockpit, she did all that. Through a combination of sheer will, good luck, a well-heeled, forty-year marriage and natural piloting abilities of the sort few have possessed, Cochran traveled the globe with the wind and the stars and came back to Earth to tell the tale. And although the brash, take-no-prisoners personal style that was her trademark might have closed a few doors to her, it probably opened as many more.

Cochran's life and aeronautic achievements, many of which took place at Edwards, were celebrated on base May 16 with a Jackie Cochran Day, just two days short of the 50th anniversary of the 1953 flight in which Cochran became the first woman to fly at supersonic speed. Air Force Flight Test Center commander Maj. Gen. Doug Pearson presided over the day's events, which were attended by Cochran's long-time friend and flight instructor Brig. Gen. Charles E. "Chuck" Yeager (Ret.) and by members of the World War II Women's Airforce Service Pilots (WASP) and the international women's pilot organization the Ninety-Nines, which was founded by Earhart in 1929.

The road to Cochran's aviation career began with circuitous turns through the worlds of cosmetology, nursing, business and matrimony.

After her initial stint working as a Florida hairdresser - and at the urging of a customer who told her she ought to do something more with her life - Cochran opted for nurses' training and completed a three-year program despite an almost total lack of prior formal schooling. She never adjusted to the medical profession, however, saying she could never get comfortable with the sight of blood. Leaving nursing behind, she returned to work as a beautician, taking a job in the late 1920s at a salon in Saks Fifth Avenue in New York City. At the time, she also had longer-term goals in mind - among them, launching her own cosmetics line.

Her fortunes took a promising turn in New York when, at a 1932 dinner party, she met millionaire financier Floyd Bostwick Odlum. Odlum, himself a pilot, suggested she would be able to cover more territory in efforts to beat the competition in the cosmetics world if she were able to fly around the country. It was a prophetic bit of advice that Cochran took to heart. Within months she had her pilot's license, after less than three weeks of private lessons at Roosevelt Field in Long Island. She soloed on her third day, and married Odlum in 1936.

A year after her marriage (and the same year Amelia Earhart was lost at sea), Cochran began her aviation career in earnest. She set her first three flying records in 1937 before going on to win the prestigious Bendix Transcontinental Air Race from California to Ohio in 1938 - after being, along with Earhart, one of the first women ever to fly in it, in 1935. Her 1938 first-place win in the Bendix was captured in an untried Seversky fighter.

Then in 1941, Cochran's career began to intersect the noncivilian aviation world when she put her skills to use during World War II.

Cochran had suggested to First Lady Eleanor Roosevelt in 1939 that women pilots would represent an untapped resource in relieving any potential shortage of male pilots available for combat duty once the U.S. officially entered the war. With a keen eye toward being tapped as the head of such an effort, Cochran touted the notion of recruiting women pilots to fly noncombat support missions.

Cochran traveled to Britain - in the process becoming the first woman to fly across the Atlantic in a bomber - where such a program was already successfully in place. After studying the British operation and then returning to the U.S., she was asked by President Roosevelt to find ways of using female pilots in the U.S. Army Air Corps, and in 1943, at the request of Gen. Hap Arnold, the Women's Airforce Service Pilots (WASP) organization was established under Cochran's leadership.

Her recruits were soon ferrying planes around the U.S., helping to train B-17 turret gunners, working as test pilots in repair depots and training staff pilots for navigator schools. From 1943 to 1944, 1,074 women were trained for and served in the WASP, flying over 60 million miles. Their accident rates were lower than that of male pilots, and the success of the program led Cochran to hope that the WASP would be brought formally into the U.S. military.

But it wasn't to be. Congress voted against admitting the WASP to the Army Air Forces - in some part as a result of a campaign waged by male pilots against the women's inclusion - and as the war came to a close, fewer and fewer male pilots were needed for combat duty. The WASP program was deactivated in 1944, though in 1977 President Carter signed legislation bestowing full military status and veterans' benefits on the women pilots who served. Cochran had been commissioned in 1948 as a lieutenant colonel in the U.S. Air Force Reserves.

Despite the fact that she'd achieved another first in 1945, becoming the first female civilian to be awarded the Distinguished Service Medal, for her work with the WASP, Cochran was more than disappointed by congressional unwillingness to recognize the unit. True to form, however, she took things in stride, and for a time after the war she was a Pacific and European correspondent for Liberty magazine. But with the jet age on the horizon after the war's end, it wasn't long before she turned her attentions back to flying with renewed zeal.

In 1946, she again entered the Bendix race, placing second with a time of four hours and 52 minutes, less than half her time in the 1938 race. In 1950, she set a new speed record for propeller-driven aircraft. And on May 18, 1953, after several years as an avid and disciplined flight student of her friend Yeager, she climbed into a Canadian-built F86 Sabre jet and at 625.5 mph, became the first woman to fly faster than the speed of sound.

In the years that followed Cochran continued setting records and pushing the limits imposed not only on women but on aviation in general. She was the first woman ever to make a "blind" landing, was among the early users of oxygen equipment at high altitudes. She traveled more than twice the speed of sound - 1,429 mph - in June 1964 at the controls of a Lockheed-built F-104G Starfighter, setting a standing world's record for a female pilot, and set an overall altitude record (55,253 feet) in 1961.

Between 1962 and 1964, Cochran established sixty-nine intercity and straight-line distance jet records as well as nine international speed, distance and altitude jet records. During her flying career, she was selected 14 times for the annual Clifford Burke Harmon Trophy honoring the world's best female pilot. She was inducted into the International Aerospace Hall of Fame in 1965, into the U.S. Aviation Hall of Fame in 1971, and in 1975, she became the first woman to be honored at the U.S. Air Force Academy with a permanent display of her memorabilia. All of this without benefit of official military test-pilot status - perhaps the strongest testimony of all to the impact of her personal style and its ability to open important doors.

Many of Cochran's achievements were linked to military people and planes and places at Edwards. After making her groundbreaking Mach 1 flight over California skies, it was to the Edward's Officer's Club where Cochran and Yeager and their compatriots retired to celebrate - though at least one invited guest, another female aviator legendary in Edwards history, was less than thrilled to be on the guest list. Florence "Pancho" Barnes and Cochran, it is said, reportedly were bitter adversaries both personally and professionally, possibly in part because of rivaling friendships with Yeager.

The accolades continued for Cochran in the years up to and after her death in August 1980, at the Indio, Calif., ranch she and Odlum had called home for many years. She was twice honored with the business community's national Woman of the Year award, for her success in the cosmetics industry. Near her Manhatten apartment, she established an orphanage that she supported until her death. She was promoted in 1969 to the rank of colonel in the Air Force Reserves, and also had a street at Edwards named for her. In 1996, the U.S. Postal Service issued a commemorative stamp in her honor.

STS-112 pilot Pamela A. Melroy (bottom right) attended the May 16 Jackie Cochran Day activities at Edwards. Like Bohn-Meyer, Melroy cites Cochran as an inspiration to her career as a NASA astronaut. Melroy, Mission Specialist Sandra H. Magnus (top) and Peggy A. Whitson (center), Expedition 5 Flight Engineer, are pictured October 11, 2002, in the Svezda Service Module of the ISS. NASA Photo

Despite her many achievements, however, it is still her rival in the 1935 Bendix race - a race the two women were allowed to enter only after Cochran insisted that race officials abandon the men-only entrance requirement - who is usually remembered first when the talk turns to female aviators. The disparity between Amelia Earhart's and Cochran's memory might be due to several factors, the greatest of which is probably Earhart's untimely death, but other factors may also contribute.

"Don't forget that the two were essentially interested in different types of flying," noted Dryden Chief Historian Michael Gorn. "Earhart more for 'adventure' flights, Cochran for speed and record-setting." The romance of Earhart's global exploring may resonate more deeply in the public mind, Gorn suggested, as years continue to pass following her death.

And then there's the issue of Cochran's personal style, often said to have been brash to the point of being abrasive. History, Gorn said, may be inclined to treat differently a woman who was unafraid of speaking her mind, sometimes at the risk of alienating those around her - including presidents, military brass, business leaders or other celebrities.

But in a world dominated entirely by men, Cochran was determined to carve out her niche and emerge the victor at all she attempted. To the question of whether she was successful at doing so either because of her personal style or in spite of it, "I'd say it's probably a combination of both," Gorn said.

And if she was brash, added Dryden historian Curtis Peebles, it was no more than she might deserve.

"There are people with egos, and then there are people whose egos are justified - she was one of those," Peebles said.

Cochran also possessed a softer side, however, according to one of the women she recruited for the WASP.

"Jackie was a friend you could call on," said former WASP FloraBelle Reece, one of three members of the unit now living in Lancaster. "She was always able to help if we needed her - say, if we had some kind of trouble at a base somewhere. She had a tremendous amount of community spirit."

With a nod to the sort of decorum not typically associated with Cochran, "She'd say, 'Now, if you're going to drink - and I wish you wouldn't, but if you do - just remember that you're ladies,'" Reece recalled. "She wanted to be proud of us, and for us to be proud of ourselves."

Cochran also bought a pair of wings for each WASP to wear on her unifor when the government declined to provide them. And in her leadership role, self-improvement was a notion she took seriously. "When she'd come across a new word she wasn't familiar with, she'd ask us to help her use it two or three times in a day, just so she could master it. She taught us how to write our congressmen," said Reece.

"We all benefited in many ways from knowing her."

Ultimately, though, among aviators associated with Cochran in history's annals, it may be less often Earhart than another legendary figure with whom Cochran is destined to be linked.

"Well, she was very 'Yeager-like,'" Peebles said. Maj. Gen. Fred Ascani (Ret.), a record-setting test pilot and contemporary of the aviatrix, once said of Cochran's ability, "There are cautious pilots who never want to know what the plane's maximum performance is, and then there are pilots like Yeager and Cochran."

The issue of gender thus removed, leveling aviation history's playing field once and for all, it may be in connection with her friend and teacher Chuck Yeager that Cochran's name will most often come up.

And Cochran would no doubt have liked it that way.