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American Experience: Fly Girls, Cornelia Fort (1919 -1943)
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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.
http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/amex/flygirls/peopleevents/pandeAMEX07.html
19 replies
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Tora! Tora! Tora! is a wonderful film which tells the fairly accurate story of the events leading up to the Pearl Harbor attack.
Produced by a combined US and Japanese production crew. A wonderful cast. One of the best historic films ever made, with little to no Hollywood gloss.
Played by Jeff Donnell in the film. (Yes, that is a woman.)
Produced by a combined US and Japanese production crew. A wonderful cast. One of the best historic films ever made, with little to no Hollywood gloss.
Played by Jeff Donnell in the film. (Yes, that is a woman.)
Yes, done with special effects, but fairly good special effects.
Needless to say, what she did that day is a matter of legend and fact.
Chicks rule.
I say this as a dude who drools. 
I love it when you do that. Cracks me up.
http://www.amazon.com/Women-Courage-Story-Pilots-World/dp/B0036KLXI4
Saw this on PBS a number of years back. Don't know why it wasn't seen more widely. There have been other films since, including "We Served Too", a very recent one.
The Brits had their own version -- "Spitfire Girls", some of whom were Yanks.
I believe the Soviet Union had more female pilots than any other nation (in line with Soviet "equality of the sexes"
, and they flew combat missions -- the (in)famous "night witches", as the Germans called them -- who flew without parachutes and glided their bombers over their targets with the engines shut off !
Saw this on PBS a number of years back. Don't know why it wasn't seen more widely. There have been other films since, including "We Served Too", a very recent one.
The Brits had their own version -- "Spitfire Girls", some of whom were Yanks.
I believe the Soviet Union had more female pilots than any other nation (in line with Soviet "equality of the sexes"
, and they flew combat missions -- the (in)famous "night witches", as the Germans called them -- who flew without parachutes and glided their bombers over their targets with the engines shut off !