Female Pilot Faster Than Sound

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By Maggie Shipstead

Faster Than Sound of molestation in a cart carrying spools of thread. Some adults saw her potential. One woman hired a 10-year-old Bessie to work in her beauty shop. By 15, Bessie was a skilled hairdresser working in Montgomery, Alabama, where she bought herself a Model T. Bessie also kept a secret: She’d had a baby at 14 and was married for a few years to the father, a man named Cochran, whose name she took. Her son lived with her parents and died as a child.

When a determination to reinvent herself led her to New York City in 1929, she changed her name from Bessie to Jackie and also claimed to be an orphan. At 23, she got a job at Antoine’s salon at Saks Fifth Avenue; in the winters she drove south to work at Antoine’s Florida outpost. At a 1932 dinner in Miami, she was seated next to a financier and industrialist named Floyd Odlum. He was smitten—and married. Still, they began a relationship. Odlum encouraged her interest in learning to fly; her talent soon became obvious. “Flying got into my soul instantly,” she wrote. Odlum also financed her dream of starting a cosmetics business, which thrived. After Odlum divorced, they married, and his devotion never seemed to waver until votio death in 1976. his de Cochran began racing in 1934 and Coc steadily racked up flying trophies, steadi broke records and, during World War organized the training of female II, org pilots to transport warplanes in the United Kingdom Kingdo and the United States.

Not everyone was a fan. Cochran could be and demanding. Wealthy arrogant, abrasive abrasi Odlum, she traveled with heaps thanks to Odl of luggage and an jewelry and was impossibly with her household staff. But she exacting wit commanded respect, attaining national fame as a fearless and extraordinarily skilled pilot. She and Chuck Yeager, the famed military ace and test pilot, became friends. Each was the lo ttype to push an aircraft until

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N AUGUST 24, 1961, a jet streaked over the desert near Edwards Air Force Base.

Fast planes were not unusual in that stretch of sky over Southern California, but women pilots were. In the cockpit of Northrop’s new two-seat, twin-engine supersonic trainer, the T-38 Talon, was Jacqueline Cochran. And the 55-yearold pilot was on a mission: reclaim her status as the fastest woman alive.

Eight years before, she had averaged 653 miles per hour over a 100-kilometer (62-mile) course urse in an F-86 Sabre, setting a world speed record and d becoming the first woman to break the sound barrier. But the French test pilot Jacqueline Auriol soon bested her record, by 63 miles es per hour. Could the T-38 help the seasoned racer get it back?

Cochran was born Bessie Pitt-man in a Florida Panhandle lummber town and lived with her parents and four siblings in a series of ramshackle houses. “It was bleak and bitter and harsh,” Jackie wrote of herr childhood. “But it taught me indendependence and the necessity of fending ending for myself.” Freedom had its horrors: orrors: As an 8-year-old working 12-hour shifts hifts in a cotton mill, she would hide from the constant threat 24

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L E F T: M A R K AV I N O / N AS M ; R I G H T: JA M ES WA L K E R / N AS M

When the spirited Jackie Cochran piloted this jet, she broke all kinds of barriers

Photograph by James Walker

FROM THE SMITHSONIAN N AT I O N A L A I R A N D S PAC E MUSEUM

Above, the T-38 Talon that Cochran flew, pictured before its recent restoration. Left, the Talon’s swept wings. The plane will be on view at the National Air and Space Museum in fall 2022.

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Cochran in one of three P-51B Mustangs she owned, June 1947.

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alarms blared and red lights flashed—and then to keep right on pushing.

The T-38 Talon was created to train a new generation of pilots, who would go on to fly a wide variety of aircraft, from supersonic fighters like the F-15 Eagle to subsonic bombers like the B-52. Between 1961 and 1972, almost 1,200 T-38s were produced, and more than 72,000 American pilots trained in them. The T-38 also became a trainer for astronauts; during the space shuttle era, it escorted the returning shuttle on its approach for landing.

The jet was brand-new when Cochran persuaded Northrop to lend her one. Yeager trained her on it for several weeks before she began her record attempts and was flying as her wingman that day in August 1961, when she averaged 844.20 miles per hour over a straightaway, besting Auriol’s record by 129 miles per hour. Over the next seven weeks, Cochran set seven more records in the Talon, including one for absolute altitude at 56,071 feet and another for speed over a 100-kilometer closed course. “She flew one of the most perfect runs that has ever been flown,” Yeager later wrote of that feat.

Jackie Cochran’s fastest flight came in June 1964 at the age of 58 in an F-104G Starfighter that she pushed to 1,429 miles per hour, exceeding Mach 2 and setting a new record for a female pilot.

She died in 1980, age 74. The plane etched on her gravestone in Indio, California, has the unmistakable swept wings and glass cockpit of a T-38 Talon.

SEE MORE PHOTOGRAPHS of the T-38 Talon at Smithsonianmag.com/cochran

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| December 2021