People & Events
Cornelia Fort (1919 -1943)
On December 7th, 1941 Cornelia Fort, a young civilian flight instructor
from Tennessee, and her regular Sunday-morning student took off from John
Rodgers Airport in Honolulu. Fort's apprentice was advanced enough to fly
regular take-offs and landings and this was to have been his last lesson before
going solo. With the novice at the controls, Fort noticed a military aircraft
approaching from the sea. At first that didn't strike her as unusual; Army
planes were a common sight in the skies above Hawaii. But at the last moment,
she realized this aircraft was different and that it had set itself on a
collision course with her plane. She wrenched the controls from her student's
grasp and managed to pull the plane up just in time to avoid a mid-air crash.
As she looked around she saw the red sun symbol on the wings of the
disappearing plane and in the distance, probably not more than a quarter mile
away, billowing smoke was rising over Pearl Harbor. The disbelieving Fort had just unwittingly witnessed the
U.S. entry into World War II. A little more than a year after this near miss,
Fort would be flying military aircraft for the U.S. and a mid-air collision
would tragically make her the first American woman to die on active military
duty.
That Fort should one day put on a flight suit, live in army barracks and fly
some of the largest and fastest military aircraft of the day, would probably
have raised more than a few eyebrows in the genteel circles in which she was
raised. Dr. Rufus Fort and his wife Louise had brought up their oldest
daughter to be the demure wife of a Southern gentleman. Their five children
grew up in an opulent 24-room house originally built in 1815. It stood on 365
acres of land along the Cumberland River in Davidson County, Tennessee. A
chauffeur drove the children to their exclusive private schools. And after
Cornelia turned 19 her father presented her to society in an elaborate
debutante ball, attended by hundreds.
Around the time Dr. Fort died in the spring of 1940, Fort took her first flying
lesson. She was instantly addicted. Though she could never quite articulate
why she loved planes so much, her sister would later claim that it was quite
simple: Cornelia was, Louise observed "a great rebel of her time." Within a year Cornelia had become the first
female flight instructor in Nashville. After President Franklin D. Roosevelt
established the Civilian Pilots Training Program, she took a flight
instructor's job at Fort Collins, Colorado. Then in the fall of 1941, she was
hired to teach defense workers, soldiers and sailors to fly in Hawaii. In a
letter home to her mother she wrote: "If I leave here I will leave the best job
that I can have (unless the national emergency creates a still better one), a
very pleasant atmosphere, a good salary, but far the best of all are the planes
I fly. Big and fast and better suited for advanced flying."
In fact, the national emergency created by America's entry into the war did
temporarily create better opportunities for Fort and many other U.S. women
pilots. The first invitation came in a telegram dated January 24, 1942 from
leading female aviator Jackie Cochran. It asked Fort to join a select group of
American women who would fly with the Royal Air Force Air Transport Auxiliary
in Britain. Fort couldn't accept the offer because she wasn't back in the
continental U.S. in time, but in the fall of 1942 she was one of a handful of
women to receive another invitation. This time the telegram asked her, "if
interested, to report within twenty-four hours to Wilmington, Delaware, for
service in the Ferrying Division of the Air Transport Command." Fort was more
than interested, she was ecstatic. Here was a chance to play an important role
in the war effort. In a letter home she wrote, "the heavens have opened up and
rained blessings on me. The army has decided to let women ferry ships and I'm
going to be one of them."
The female pilots in the newly established squadron, the Women's Auxiliary
Ferrying Service, or WAFs as they were known, were hired to fly planes from
factories to military air bases. Their services freed up male pilots for
combat missions. Fort frequently found herself flying in open cockpits in
freezing weather without a radio. On these ferrying missions during the war,
the women often had to navigate by comparing maps with landmarks they could see
below them. The job was made even more difficult because some of the planes,
though tested, had never been flown before, and many of the air bases were
camouflaged. In poor weather conditions a cross-country trip could sometimes
take several days. At the end of a mission,
Fort would hitch rides back on whatever form of transportation was available,
sometimes it was a train sometimes another plane.
From the very beginning, Fort and the other women in the squad were the focus
of hostility from their male counterparts. "Any girl who has flown at all,"
she once wrote, "grows used to the prejudice of most men pilots who will trot
out any number of reasons why women can't possibly be good pilots... The only
way to show the disbelievers, the snickering hanger pilots," she concluded, "is
to show them." The women did just that.
They were resilient, professional, and as capable as the men of flying any
military aircraft they were asked to. They called in sick less frequently and
they maintained a marginally better safety record.
Fort flew for her country for just a few brief months. On March 21, 1943, she was one of a number of pilots, both male
and female, who had been assigned to ferry BT-13s to Love Field in Dallas
Texas. During the course of that mission, one of the men's landing gear
clipped Fort's airplane, sending it plummeting to earth. Fort didn't have time
to parachute to safety. Her commanding officer, sent a compassionate letter
back to the young pilot's mother: "My feeling about the loss of Cornelia,"
wrote Nancy Love, "is hard to put into words -- I can only say that I miss her
terribly, and loved her...If there can be any comforting thought, it is that
she died as she wanted to -- in an Army airplane, and in the service of her
country."
Despite the words of sympathy, Fort and the other 37 female pilots who died
flying military planes during the war, received no military recognition. The
army didn't even pay for their burial expenses because the women were
considered civilians. Fort's achievements
as a military pilot are commemorated by an airpark named after her that was
built in 1945 near her family farm. Her own words on an historical marker at
the site simply and modestly sum up her wartime contribution: "I am grateful"
she wrote, "that my one talent, flying, was useful to my country."
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