DCochran, Jacqueline1910?╨1980aviator and business leaderBorn in Pensacola, Florida, about 1910, Jacqueline Cochran grew up in poverty in a foster home. At eight she went to work in a cotton mill in Georgia; she later was trained as a beautician and pursued that career in Montgomery, Alabama, in Pensacola, and from about 1931 in New York City. She took her first flying lessons in 1932 and soon mastered the technical aspects of aviation and navigation, later studying privately with a navy pilot friend in San Diego. Meanwhile, in 1934, she organized a cosmetics firm that grew and prospered under her management until she sold it in 1963. In 1935 Cochran became the first woman to enter the Bendix Transcontinental Air Race; in 1937 she came in third, and in 1938 she won the Bendix Trophy, flying a Seversky pursuit plane. In June 1941 Cochran piloted a bomber to England and there, as a flight captain in the British Air Transport Auxiliary, trained a group of woman pilots for war transport service. Upon her return to the United States she undertook a similar program for the Army Air Forces and in July 1943 was named director of the Women╒s Airforce Service Pilots╤the WASPs╤which supplied more than a thousand auxiliary pilots for the armed forces. At the end of the war she served for a time as a Pacific and European correspondent for Liberty magazine. In 1945 she became the first woman civilian to be awarded the Distinguished Service Medal and in 1948 was commissioned a lieutenant colonel in the air force reserve. Eager to make the transition to jet aircraft, she became the first woman to break the sound barrier in 1953, piloting an F-86, and that year set world speed records for 15-, 100-, and 500-kilometer courses. Her autobiographical The Stars at Noon, written with Floyd B. Odlum (her husband from May 1936), appeared in 1954. She continued to break her old records and set new ones, including an altitude mark of 55,253 feet in 1961, and in 1964 she set the standing women╒s world speed record of 1429 miles per hour in an F-104G Super Star jet. In 1969 she was promoted to colonel in the reserve, from which she retired in 1970. She received several honorary doctoral degrees as well as the Billy Mitchell trophy in 1938, the Cross of the Legion of Honor from France in 1940, and the Gold Medal of the Federation Aeronautique Internationale in 1954.In 1959╨1963 she was the first woman president of the FÄdÄration AÄronautique Internationale, and she was also a member of many other aviation and service-connected organizations. She died in Indio, California, on August 9, 1980. ■styl ` ! ¬ 5¬ 5¬ < !I E 5¬ F !I P !I W !I ∩ !I !I \ 5¬ ] !I link `
