Jacqueline Cochran, the Girl Who Got Her License in Three Weeks, and the Thousand Women Who Flew Everything the Army Had

Jacqueline Cochran earned her pilot’s license in three weeks at Roosevelt Field on Long Island in 1932, soloing within the first few hours of training. She went on to command the Women Airforce Service Pilots (WASPs) during World War II - a program in which just over 1,000 women flew 60 million miles in two years, in every aircraft the Army had. On May 18, 1953, she became the first woman to break the sound barrier. No pilot of her era, male or female, held more speed and altitude records.

From a Cotton Mill to Roosevelt Field

Cochran was born around 1906 in the Florida panhandle under circumstances that offered almost nothing. Her family had almost nothing. She worked in cotton mills from the age of eight, standing beside machinery for twelve-hour stretches. She was essentially given to a neighboring family to raise.

By her teens she had worked her way into nursing in Pensacola. By her twenties she was a hairdresser in New York City, working in salons that served wealthy clients - and studying their ambition closely. When financier Floyd Odlum suggested at a 1932 dinner party that she could learn to fly in three weeks, she took him at his word.

She walked out of Roosevelt Field with a pilot’s license - not a student certificate - three weeks later.

Six Years of Racing, Then the Bendix Trophy

Most pilots who progress quickly through training find that competition flying humbles them. Cochran found the opposite. She had an instinctive feel for what an airplane would and wouldn’t do, and she pushed every aircraft to the edge of those limits. Within two years of earning her license, she was entering competitive races.

The Bendix Trophy was the premier cross-country air race of the era - Los Angeles to Cleveland, no mandatory stops, in whatever aircraft you could find. It drew the most experienced male pilots in the country. Cochran entered anyway, failed to win in her first attempts, and kept coming back.

In 1938, after six years of flying, she crossed the Bendix finish line first overall - not first among women, first outright. She set a new transcontinental speed record on the same flight. She was 32 years old.

The Question She Brought Back from England

In 1941, Cochran traveled to England and flew with the British Air Transport Auxiliary, ferrying aircraft for the RAF. She watched British women fly Spitfires and Hurricanes to front-line squadrons, maintaining those aircraft’s combat readiness while male pilots flew combat missions. She came home with a direct question: why wasn’t the United States doing the same thing?

The Army Air Forces were under crushing pressure. The combat pilot training pipeline was slow, and demand for qualified pilots was accelerating. Cochran went to General Hap Arnold and made her case: women could ferry aircraft, tow targets, fly instrument trainers, handle coastal patrol assignments - and free every combat-qualified man for a combat role. The math was obvious. The institutional resistance was not.

Arnold told her to make it work.

Two Programs, One Command: The Birth of the WASPs

Cochran was not the only person who had seen this opportunity. Nancy Harkness Love had proposed a nearly identical program at nearly the same time, and her version - the Women’s Auxiliary Ferrying Squadron - was already operating. The competition between the two programs and the two women leading them was real and unresolved.

The Army merged both organizations in 1943 into a single command: the Women Airforce Service Pilots, or WASPs. Cochran was named director.

More than 25,000 women applied. Fewer than 2,000 were accepted for training. Just over 1,000 graduated.

What the WASPs Actually Flew

The skeptics who assumed women could handle light trainers but not serious military aircraft were not prepared for what followed.

WASPs flew the Consolidated B-24 Liberator. They flew the Boeing B-17 Flying Fortress. They flew the North American B-25 Mitchell - the same aircraft that launched off a carrier deck in the Doolittle Raid. They towed aerial gunnery targets while live tracer rounds flew around them, so male gunners could practice tracking a moving aircraft. They ferried pursuit aircraft from factory to ferry points, including the Republic P-47 Thunderbolt, the North American P-51 Mustang, and the Lockheed P-38 Lightning.

Some WASPs checked out in aircraft their own instructors hadn’t flown yet. They’d study the manual overnight and fly the airplane the next morning. Cochran pushed her instructors hard and her pilots harder, because she was certain they could handle anything they were put in.

They proved her right on every mission they flew.

In two years, the WASPs flew 60 million miles. 38 women died in service.

Congress Disbanded the Program in December 1944

Cochran lobbied hard for the WASPs to be formally militarized - to give these women the same legal status as the men performing equivalent duties. She testified for it, wrote about it, and committed every resource she had to the effort.

In December 1944, Congress voted it down and disbanded the program entirely. The official reason was that the war was winding down and returning male combat pilots needed the assignments. The driving opposition came from male civilian flight instructors who stood to lose their draft deferments if women filled military flying slots.

The women who had given two years to the program received nothing. No discharge papers. No access to the veterans’ benefits the returning servicemen were receiving. They paid their own way home.

For 33 years, the WASPs were not recognized as veterans under U.S. law. Congress finally granted them veteran status in 1977. In 2010, the surviving WASPs received the Congressional Gold Medal. Cochran did not live to see the second recognition - she died in 1980.

Breaking the Sound Barrier: May 18, 1953

After the war, Cochran went back to the cockpit. She raced. She set records. She flew experimental aircraft. And on May 18, 1953, over the Mojave Desert at Edwards Air Force Base, she strapped into a North American F-86 Sabre and pushed it past the speed of sound.

She had asked Chuck Yeager - who had become the first person to officially break the sound barrier six years earlier in the Bell X-1 - to serve as her instructor for the program. Yeager flew alongside her in a second aircraft to advise on the approach and the transit through the barrier. He considered her one of the most talented and determined pilots he had ever encountered. Yeager was not a man who handed out that kind of assessment carelessly.

She crossed the barrier cleanly, noted the instruments, and turned back toward the field.

Then she went back up and did it again - several more times, pushing faster on each pass. Getting to the barrier once wasn’t the point. She wanted to know where the ceiling was.

The Records That Followed

In 1964, at age 58, Cochran set a women’s speed record in a Lockheed F-104 Starfighter, pushing the aircraft to nearly twice the speed of sound.

She won the Harmon Trophy as the world’s outstanding woman aviator more times than any other pilot in history. She held more speed and altitude records than any pilot of her era, regardless of gender. She was the first woman elected president of the Fédération Aéronautique Internationale, the international governing body for aviation and aerospace records.

She had started with three weeks and a dinner-table dare.

Why This Still Matters

The WASPs demonstrated something that required a formal program, two years of operations, and 60 million miles to prove to an institution that did not want to believe it: the pool of capable military pilots was far larger than the Army had admitted. Women could do the work. Women were doing the work.

Cochran understood this before the program existed. She saw the solution, pushed it into being over sustained institutional resistance, and when the program was disbanded for the wrong reasons, she spent the last decades of her life making sure the record was not quietly buried.

The women who served were not recognized as veterans for 33 years. The Congressional Gold Medal came 66 years after the program ended. History has validated Cochran’s case completely - the recognition just arrived on a long delay.

Key Takeaways

Jacqueline Cochran earned her pilot’s license in three weeks in 1932 and won the Bendix Trophy outright - first overall, not first among women - in 1938 after six years of flying.
She established the Women Airforce Service Pilots (WASPs) in 1943, through which just over 1,000 women flew 60 million miles in every aircraft in the U.S. Army’s inventory, including the B-17, B-24, P-51, and P-47.
38 WASPs died in service. Congress disbanded the program in December 1944 without granting the women military status or veterans’ benefits.
Cochran became the first woman to break the sound barrier on May 18, 1953, in an F-86 Sabre over the Mojave Desert, with Chuck Yeager flying alongside as her advisor.
The WASPs were finally recognized as veterans in 1977 and received the Congressional Gold Medal in 2010.