Jacqueline Cochran

Jacqueline Cochran (May 11, 1906 – August 9, 1980) was an American pilot and business executive.

She pioneered women's aviation as one of the most prominent racing pilots of her generation.

Circa 1920, (she would have been 13 or 14), she married Robert Cochran and gave birth to a son, Robert, who died in 1925 at the age of 5.

After the marriage ended, she kept the name Cochran and began using Jacqueline or Jackie as her given name.

Cochran then became a hairdresser and got a job in Pensacola, eventually moving to New York City.

There, she used her looks and driving personality to get a job at a prestigious salon at Saks Fifth Avenue.

Although Cochran denied her family and her past, she remained in touch with them and provided for them over the years.

Some of her family moved to her ranch in California after she remarried.

They were instructed to always say they were her adopted family.

Cochran apparently wanted to hide from the public the early chapters of her life and was successful in doing so until after her death.

Later Cochran met Floyd Bostwick Odlum, founder of Atlas Corp and CEO of RKO in Hollywood.

Fourteen years her senior, he was reputed to be one of the 10 wealthiest men in the world.

Odlum became enamored of Cochran and offered to help her establish a cosmetics business.

After a friend offered her a ride in an aircraft, Cochran began taking flying lessons at Roosevelt Airfield, Long Island in the early 1930s and learned to fly an aircraft in three weeks.

She then soloed and within two years obtained her commercial pilot's license.

Known by her friends as "Jackie", and maintaining the Cochran name, she was one of three women to compete in the MacRobertson Air Race in 1934.

Odlum, whom she married in 1936 after his divorce, was an astute financier and savvy marketer who recognized the value of publicity for her business.

Calling her line of cosmetics Wings to Beauty, she flew her own aircraft around the country promoting her products.

Years later, Odlum used his Hollywood connections to get Marilyn Monroe to endorse Cochran's line of lipstick.

In 1937, she was the only woman to compete in the Bendix race and worked with Amelia Earhart to open the race to women.

That year, she also set a new women's world speed record.

By 1938, she was considered the best female pilot in the United States.

She had won the Bendix and set a new transcontinental speed record as well as altitude records.

Cochran was the first woman to fly a bomber across the Atlantic.

She won five Harmon Trophies.

Sometimes called the "Speed Queen", at the time of her death she held more speed, distance, or altitude records in aviation history than any other pilot.

Cochran was a friend of Amelia Earhart.

Although she was not a founding member of the Ninety-Nines, she was one of their most influential members.

She was president of the Ninety-Nines from 1941 to 1943, and was instrumental in ensuring that women pilots would be able to participate in the newly-founded Civil Air Patrol as well as the WASP.

In her monthly editorials for the Ninety-Nines Newsletter, she exhorted members to join the CAP or the WASP, and to do what they could to help the war effort.

Before the United States joined World War II, Cochran was part of "Wings for Britain", an organization that ferried American-built aircraft to Britain, becoming the first woman to fly a bomber (a Lockheed Hudson V) across the Atlantic.

In Britain, she volunteered her services to the Royal Air Force.

For several months she worked for the British Air Transport Auxiliary (ATA), recruiting qualified women pilots in the United States and taking them to England where they joined the ATA.

Cochran attained the rank of Flight Captain (equivalent to a Squadron Leader in the RAF or a Major in the U.S. Air Force) in the ATA.

Cochran (along with Nancy Love) was the wartime head of the Women Airforce Service Pilots (WASP) (1943–1944), which employed about 1000 civilian American women in a non-combat role to ferry planes from factories to port cities.

Cochran was later a sponsor of the Mercury 13 women astronaut program.

Jacqueline Cochran, born Bessie Lee Pittman, in Pensacola, (some sources indicate she was born in DeFuniak Springs) in the Florida Panhandle, was the youngest of the five children of Mary (Grant) and Ira Pittman, a skilled millwright who frequently relocated setting up and reworking sawmills.

While her family was not wealthy, Cochran's childhood living in small-town Florida was similar to those in other families of the era.

Contrary to some accounts, there was always food on the table and she was not adopted, as she often claimed.

She set numerous records and was the first woman to break the sound barrier on 18 May 1953.