Celebrating Cornelia Fort at our November meeting

Carrie Ann Bright, Regent presented a very informative program on Cornelia Fort, from Nashville, TN, for our November meeting.

In 1940, a year after Cornelia graduated from college, took a joyride and decided she wanted to fly airplanes. She took lessons and became a pilot.

A year later she was giving a flying lesson in Hawaii when she saw Japanese warplanes heading toward Pearl Harbor. They fired on her, but she survived. The next year she was one of a small group of women chosen to be members of the Women’s Auxiliary Flying Squadron, which took new planes from factories to military bases.

Cornelia Fort was killed in a mid-air collision in 1943, becoming the first female pilot in American history to die on active duty.