Jacqueline Cochran, the Orphan Who Outflew Everyone, and the Sound Barrier Nobody Believed a Woman Would Break

Jacqueline Cochran held more speed, altitude, and distance records than any other pilot in aviation history - male or female. She broke the sound barrier in 1953, commanded a wartime flight program that put 1,074 women in the cockpits of military aircraft, and she did all of it starting from a childhood so impoverished she had no birth certificate and no family name she was born with.

From Cotton Mill to Cockpit

Cochran was born around 1912 in the Florida Panhandle, possibly under the name Bessie Lee Pittman - though records were never properly kept. She was passed between families in the mill towns near Pensacola and was working a cotton gin by the age of eight. No school, no stability, no obvious path forward.

She put herself through hairdresser school in Montgomery, Alabama, and worked her way north through a series of salons. By her mid-twenties she had landed a position at Antoine’s salon inside Saks Fifth Avenue - one of the most prestigious establishments in New York. The distance she had traveled was extraordinary, and she had barely started.

She met Floyd Odlum, one of the wealthiest men in America, who made his fortune during the Depression by buying distressed companies everyone else was abandoning. He and Cochran became lifelong partners, and his practical advice launched her aviation career: if she wanted to build a national cosmetics business, she needed to cover the country. She should learn to fly.

Three Weeks to a Private Certificate

Cochran took her first flying lesson in the summer of 1932. Three weeks later she held her private pilot certificate. Her instructor at Roosevelt Field on Long Island later said he had never seen anyone absorb stick-and-rudder skills that quickly. She had a physical intuition for the aircraft that most pilots spend years developing.

She did not ease into it. Instrument rating, then commercial certificate, then racing.

Winning the Bendix Outright

The Bendix Trophy was the great transcontinental air race of the era - Los Angeles to Cleveland, pilots pushing the fastest aircraft available as hard as they would go. Cochran entered in 1934. An engine problem over Arizona ended that attempt. She landed, got repairs, pressed on. Did not finish in the money. Kept going back.

By 1937 she was setting women’s national speed records. By 1938 she had stopped competing in the women’s division entirely.

The 1938 Bendix was the result: Cochran in a Seversky P-35, crossing the finish line first - not first among the women, first overall. Three thousand miles of American sky, and she got there before every man in the field. She collected the $10,000 prize and the trophy.

Building the WASP Program

When the United States entered World War II, the Army Air Forces faced a persistent bottleneck. Aircraft were sitting on factory ramps that needed ferrying to bases. Training planes required repositioning. Targets needed towing for anti-aircraft gunnery practice. All of it required skilled pilots, and every skilled pilot was either flying combat or flying training.

Cochran had already been to England, where she helped deliver bombers for the Royal Air Force and studied the Air Transport Auxiliary, which included women pilots. She came back with a proposal: train American women to fly military aircraft, freeing male pilots for combat roles.

The resistance was organized and serious. Senior officers who considered the idea absurd. Union pilots who saw it as a threat. Members of Congress hostile to women in military aviation for reasons that had nothing to do with flying.

Cochran built the program anyway.

As director of the Women Airforce Service Pilots, she oversaw a program in which 1,074 women ultimately served. They flew 60 types of military aircraft, ferried everything from basic trainers to the Boeing B-29 Superfortress, towed targets for live anti-aircraft gun crews, and tested repaired aircraft before they were returned to male pilots. In total they flew more than 60 million miles for the Army Air Forces.

Thirty-eight of them died in service.

The WASPs were not commissioned officers. They were civil service employees. They received no military benefits and no military burial honors. The families of women killed received no death benefit. Squadmates paid for burials out of their own pockets.

The program was shut down in December 1944 - with the war still ongoing - because male pilots returning from overseas needed reassignment to domestic duties the WASPs were already performing. Politics overruled merit. Cochran fought it and lost.

The WASPs did not receive honorable military discharge status until 1977, thirty-three years after the program ended. Congress awarded them the Congressional Gold Medal in 2009, sixty-five years after dissolution.

May 18, 1953: The Sound Barrier

After the war, Cochran kept flying. She became the first woman to fly a jet aircraft and spent years lobbying the Air Force for access to military aviation programs.

On May 18, 1953, at Rogers Dry Lake, California, near Edwards Air Force Base, she got what she had been working toward.

The aircraft was an F-86 Sabre - the swept-wing fighter American pilots were flying in the Korean War. Not an experimental rocket plane. A production aircraft. Cochran climbed to altitude, pushed over into a dive, and went through Mach 1.

She was the first woman in the world to break the sound barrier.

She later described the ride as smooth - the buffeting she had expected just before the transition was less severe than anticipated, and the Sabre handled the transition cleanly. She made three supersonic passes that day. She wanted no ambiguity about what had happened.

The F-104 and a Record That Still Stands

In the early 1960s, Cochran got access to a Lockheed F-104 Starfighter - known in some circles as the missile with a man in it, one of the fastest production aircraft ever built. She flew it to women’s world records at speeds approaching 1,500 miles per hour. She set the women’s altitude record. She set records in closed-course events and straight-line speed runs.

By the time she finished flying, Jacqueline Cochran held more speed, altitude, and distance records than any other pilot in history - male or female.

She was awarded the Distinguished Service Medal, the Distinguished Flying Cross, and France’s Legion of Honor. In 1971 she became the first woman inducted into the Aviation Hall of Fame.

She died in 1980 at her home in Indio, California, somewhere in her early seventies. No one knows precisely because no one ever properly recorded her birth. She arrived without documentation and left having filled more logbooks than most pilots ever imagine.

Key Takeaways

Cochran earned her private pilot certificate in three weeks in the summer of 1932 and went on to hold more aviation records than any pilot in history.
She won the 1938 Bendix Trophy race outright, finishing first against an all-male field in a Seversky P-35.
As director of the WASPs, she put 1,074 women in the cockpits of military aircraft, flying over 60 million miles - but they served as civilians with no military benefits, and 38 died without government burial honors.
On May 18, 1953, she became the first woman to break the sound barrier, making three supersonic passes in an F-86 Sabre over Rogers Dry Lake, California.
The WASPs waited 33 years for honorable military discharge status and 65 years for the Congressional Gold Medal.