Ron Cates nag-retweet
She was already in the sky when Pearl Harbor was attacked and most people have never heard her name.
Cornelia Fort was 22 years old on the morning of December 7, 1941. She was a civilian flight instructor in Hawaii, guiding a student through routine maneuvers in a small training plane. The sky was clear. The lesson was going well.
Then a military aircraft screamed past them, so close she could see the pilot's face. She looked directly at him. He looked back.
It was not a drill. It was a Japanese pilot. And below them, Pearl Harbor was under attack.
Fort immediately took control of the plane. The sky around her filled with smoke, gunfire, and chaos. She navigated through it all and landed safely at a nearby airfield while the world erupted into war beneath her wings.
"There's no way I'm staying on the sidelines," she told her parents.
In 1942, Fort joined the Women Airforce Service Pilots-the WASP. These women ferried military aircraft across the country, tested planes fresh off the assembly line, and towed targets for live ammunition training so male pilots could deploy to combat. They wore uniforms. They followed orders. They faced real danger every time they took off.
On March 21, 1943, Cornelia Fort was ferrying a BT-13 trainer aircraft over Texas when her plane collided mid air with another aircraft in formation. She died on impact. She was 24 years old.
She became the first woman pilot in American history to die while serving on active duty.
God bless this American hero. 🫡🇺🇸
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