03/22/2026
On 21 March 1943, Cornelia Fort became the first female pilot in the US to give her life in the line of duty.
Fort was leading a flight of five Vultee BT-13 Valiants on a ferry flight from Long Beach, CA, to an airfield in Texas. The other planes were being flown by men who were inexperienced military pilots.
About 10 miles south of Merkel, Texas, one of the male pilots began repeatedly flying up close to Fort’s aircraft and then dropping back, behavior interpreted by the other pilots as showing off or trying to impress the woman leading the formation. On one of those close passes, his landing gear struck Fort’s left wing, tearing it away and sending the aircraft into the fatal dive. She was just 24 years old.
The U.S. Army did not provide military funeral benefits because the Women’s Auxiliary Ferrying Squadron and later WASP were classified as civilian employees, not members of the armed forces. Fort’s fellow women pilots took up a collection among themselves to cover the cost of returning her body to her family in Nashville.
Cornelia Fort was actually the first American pilot to encounter the Japanese attack at Pearl Harbor just 16 months before. Serving as flight instructor on Oahu, teaching takeoffs and landings to a student in an Interstate Cadet on December 7, 1941, Fort saw a military airplane on a collision course and swiftly grabbed the controls from her student to pull up over the oncoming aircraft. It was then she saw the rising sun insignia on the wings. She quickly landed at John Rodgers Airport. A pursuing Zero strafed her plane and the runway as she and her student ran for cover.
After her experience on December 7, 1941, Fort knew she needed to answer her country's call for supporting the war effort and, in September of 1942, she was one of the first 25 women accepted into the Women’s Auxiliary Ferrying Squadron (WAFS) and assigned to the 6th Ferrying Group based at Long Beach, CA. The WAFS merged with the Women’s Flying Training Detachment (WFTD) in August of 1943 to form the Women Airforce Service Pilots (WASP).
