Jerrie Cobb - Record-setting Career

Record-setting Career

By age 19, Cobb was teaching men to fly. At 21, she was delivering military fighters and four-engine bombers to foreign Air Forces worldwide. Cobb had a three-year romance with airplane delivery business owner and veteran World War II pilot Jack Ford, whom she met in Miami, FL while working at a maintenace hangar. They were engaged for two years, but the relationship ended tragically with the explosion of his airplane over the Pacific.

Facing sexual discrimination and the return of many qualified male pilots after World War II, she had to take on less sought after jobs, such as patrolling pipelines and crop dusting. Regardless, she went on to earn her Multi-Engine, Instrument, Flight Instructor, and Ground Instructor ratings as well as her Airline Transport license.

Cobb went on to set new world records for speed, distance, and absolute altitude while still in her twenties. When she became the first woman to fly in the world's largest air exposition, the Salon Aeronautique Internacional in Paris, her fellow airmen then named her Pilot of the Year and awarded her the Amelia Earhart Gold Medal of Achievement. Life Magazine named her one of the nine women of the "100 most important young people in the United States."

To save for money to buy a surplus World War II Fairchild PT-23, and a chance to be self-employed, Cobb played women's softball on a semi-professional team, the Oklahoma City Queens.

By 1959 (age 28) she was a pilot and manager for Aero Design and Engineering Company, which also made the Aero Commander aircraft she used in her record making feats, and was one of the few women executives in aviation. By 1960, she had 7,000 hours of flying time and held 3 world aviation records: the 1959 world record for nonstop long-distance flight, the 1959 world light plane speed record, and a 1960 world altitude record for lightweight aircraft of 37,010 ft. In May 1961, NASA Administrator James Webb appointed Cobb as a consultant to the NASA space program.