B essie Lee Pittman was born in Muscogee, Florida in 1906 and grew up in extreme poverty. She started working for a wage before she was 10 years old and married Jack Cochran when she was just 14. Ambitious and determined, she struck out on her own at 19, landing a job as a hairstylist in a high-end beauty salon in Pensacola, Florida. Her salon talents also led her to work in a prestigious Saks Fifth Avenue salon in New York and the salon Antoine de Paris. She kept her married name but changed her first name. Jacqueline Cochran never publicly acknowledged her family again but did financially support them.

Her job led to friendships with the clientele and to meeting her second husband Floyd Odlum—a wealthy venture capitalist. When he said he’d pay for her pilot’s license if she could earn it in less than six weeks, she took him up on the offer. Cochran earned it in only three weeks.

Her drive made Cochran highly successful but relatively isolated from the close-knit group of women pilots of the 1930s. At the same time, she opened her own cosmetics business, Wings of Beauty. By 1939, she was the most famous living female pilot in America.

As World War II started, Cochran campaigned to lead a training program for female pilots to support the US Air Force. Despite assurances from General Hap Arnold that she would get a call for such a commission, impatience motivated Cochran to move forward with other ventures. She led a group of American women pilots to England to join the Air Transport Auxiliary in 1942. That trip across the pond made Cochran the only woman to ferry a warplane across the Atlantic during WWII. Once in England, Cochran learned of the Women’s Auxiliary Ferry Squadron (WAFS) formed by pilot Nancy Love. Infuriated by this perceived slight from General Arnold, Cochran flew back to America, confronted Arnold and got permission to create the Women’s Flying Training Detachment (WFTD). Ultimately, Love’s WAFS and Cochran’s WFTD were combined to form the Women Airforce Service Pilots (WASP) in July of 1943 under Cochran’s control.

Jackie Cochran had a need for speed. She holds the most aviation records of any pilot—the majority of which are speed records. In 1953, she became the first woman to break the sound barrier. In 1964, she became the first woman to go twice the speed of sound, breaking her own speed records three times in a single day.

Along with her need for speed, Cochran was a perfectionist—wanting everything done her way or not at all. She was wildly protective of her programs, going to extreme lengths to see them succeed but only if she was in charge. She refused to consider integrating the WASPs into the Women’s Army Corps. After she failed the initial round of testing for the Mercury 13—the off-books women’s astronaut program, Cochran testified against the program before Congress.

Jackie Cochran was an unstoppable force until her death in 1980.

Biography provided by Brenda Mandt, The Museum of Flight