10/29/2026
Jackie Cochran was 8 years old and working 12-hour shifts in a cotton mill. Until then, she had never owned a pair of shoes. She slept on a pallet on the floor and wore clothes made from feed sacks. She later called those years “bleak and bitter and harsh.”
As a girl, she went to work in a beauty shop. She became a skilled hairdresser and worked her way up to a Saks Fifth Avenue salon in New York.
In 1932, a businessman named Floyd Odlum suggested that flying could help her build a cosmetics business. He offered to pay for her lessons if she could earn a pilot’s license during her 6-week vacation. She did it in 3 weeks. “A beauty operator ceased to exist and an aviator was born,” she later recalled.
She started racing airplanes, and in 1938 she beat the men to win the Bendix Trophy, among the most prestigious air races in America.
In 1939, when she asked the Army to let women fly its planes, the answer was no. So in 1941 she flew a military plane across the Atlantic, the first woman to do it, and recruited 25 American women to fly for Britain. In 1942, the Army changed its mind and put her in charge of training its women pilots, the program that became the WASP. 1,074 women earned their wings.
Then came the jets. In 1953, at 47, she trained with her friend Chuck Yeager and borrowed a Canadian-built F-86 Sabre. Over Edwards Air Force Base in California, she dove past the speed of sound with Yeager flying just behind her. Nobody on the ground heard the sonic boom, so she went back up and did it again, and this time the tower confirmed it. She was the first woman to fly faster than sound.
In 1964, at 58, she flew an F-104 Starfighter at 1,429 miles per hour, twice the speed of sound.
She once said she might have been born in a hovel, but she was determined to travel with the wind and the stars.
When she passed away in 1980, she held more speed, altitude and distance records than any other pilot in history, woman or man, according to the Smithsonian.
