In 1938, Harvey’s unit, like so many others around the country, was called up to active duty. He was off to Camp Barkeley, which meant the Cobbs were relocating to nearby Abilene, Texas. To ease the transition on seven-year-old Jerrie, her parents promised that Texas had as many open fields, stables for horses, and as much open sky as she could want.
Chapter 5
Washington, DC, Fall 1940
Jackie sat at a conference table with some of the biggest names in aviation, the lone woman on a fifteen-person committee. The esteemed group included Chief of the US Army Air Corps Major General Henry “Hap” Arnold. Donald Douglas was there, too; his Douglas Aircraft Company was a leader in the burgeoning business of commercial flight. First World War flying ace turned Eastern Air Lines captain Eddie Rickenbacker was at the table as well, along with Secretary of the National Aeronautic Association William Enyart. Chairing the meeting was Dr. George Lewis, head of America’s leading aeronautical research organization, the National Advisory Committee for Aeronautics. The group was charged with determining who had made the greatest contribution to aviation the preceding year and deserved to win the prestigious Collier Trophy. To be invited to serve on this committee cemented Jackie’s position as one of the nation’s leading voices in aviation—though she hadn’t yet said much.
“You certainly are quiet,” Bill Enyart remarked to her softly. “You must have something up your sleeve.”
“Just wait,” Jackie teased. “I’ve got a cute bombshell.”
When a break came in the conversation, she took advantage of the silence to address the men.
“Mr. Douglas here,” she began, motioning to the commercial airline manufacturer in the room, “is trying to build an airplane to go to forty thousand feet.” The issue, she continued, was weather. She knew from her 1938 Bendix flight that storms could be as tall as they were wide. It was one thing for a pilot to battle through bad weather and fly by instruments while sucking oxygen through a pipe stem in an air race as she had done, but it was out of the question to expect paying customers to do the same. If commercial air travel was going to succeed as a business, pilots would have to fly at 40,000 feet where there wasn’t any weather, which meant the cabin would have to be pressurized and heated for passengers’ safety and comfort. Air travel was meant to offer luxury as well as convenience. Two planes—the Lockheed XC-35 and the Boeing 307—had tested pressurized cabins at 20,000 feet. But most commercial planes—Douglas’s own DC-3 being among the more popular passenger planes in the country—still flew unpressurized at 10,000 feet. Solving the pressurization problem wasn’t an engineering challenge, it was aeromedical, so Jackie nominated the doctors who had developed the oxygen system she’d used on her Bendix flight: Harry Armstrong, Walter Boothby, and Randy Lovelace. She was determined to get the doctors the recognition they deserved.
“Well, gentlemen,” Dr. Lewis resumed speaking when Jackie had finished her statement. “I take a vote to postpone this meeting for at least a month to six weeks, and appoint Miss Cochran as a committee of one—at least she is interested enough; she’s going to do a thorough job of it—and reconvene.” The meeting was adjourned, and Jackie was appointed the task of convincing the rest of the committee that her friends deserved the award.
Jackie got straight to work. She called the Mayo Clinic and got hold of the doctors who told her the mask they had been working on was complete but needed some further testing, so she volunteered to help. First, she tested it in a portable low-pressure tank that Randy Lovelace and Walter Boothby brought to Washington. She climbed inside and, with the mask securely in place, the doctors lowered the pressure to the equivalent of 40,000 feet. It worked; Jackie didn’t feel any early signs of hypoxia. Next, she took the mask up for some flight testing. The doctors needed some data points, so in an unpressurized plane with her mask firmly in place, she flew animals to high altitudes to see what low atmospheric pressure would do to living things. Flying as high as she could manage, Jackie watched in horror as chickens exploded around the 25,000-foot mark. The chickens she didn’t mind—she’d killed chickens as a girl for food—but she drew the line at taking up goats and snakes, especially snakes. She was terrified of snakes, and no medical testing program was going to get her to fly with a snake on board, even if it was securely in a box.
When she brought her results to the Collier committee, the men were impressed, both by the doctors’ work and Jackie’s enthusiasm. The committee unanimously voted to give the award to US airlines for their safety record with special recognition to the three doctors. It was the first time in the award’s history that it was given to medical doctors, and the first time the aviation industry truly recognized the role that medicine would play in the future of flying. Randy was particularly moved by Jackie’s passion for his work and her willingness to participate in his research. Jackie considered it the most appropriate way to thank him for helping her win the Bendix. Through it all, they both recognized that they’d made a friend for life.
On December 17, 1940, Jackie hung back behind Walter Boothby as President Franklin Roosevelt presented the trophy to the three doctors in a small ceremony at the White House.
“I’ve been giving this trophy for a great many years,” Roosevelt said once the proceedings were finished. “Are these medical or scientific doctors?”
“We are medical doctors, Mr. President,” Walter answered.
“Well, what are medical doctors getting this thing for?”
George Lewis took over, knowing that just because the president awarded the trophy didn’t mean he fully understood the science behind the doctors’ achievement. “Mr. President, Miss Cochran did this singlehandedly, to bring our attention to this great piece of work that’s been done. It’s going to change the face of aviation.”
“Mr. President,” Jackie piped up, “it would take at least thirty minutes for you to hear the story of where it started, what they’re doing in Europe…” She trailed off mid-sentence. Ignoring the realization that she was speaking rather informally to the president, she seized the unique opportunity that had presented itself. “I think Dr. Boothby is the person,” she suggested, knowing he was the biggest Roosevelt fan in the room. “You might as well either make another appointment for these gentlemen to come back, or you better pull up some chairs and let everyone sit down.”
“Pa,” the president said to Edwin Martin “Pa” Watson, the United States Army major general and senior aide to the president, who seemed to have appeared out of thin air. “Have chairs brought in.”
By the end of Walter’s presentation, the president was so convinced of the value of aviation medicine that he promised an influx of funding to both the army and navy to further the research. Jackie objected. She hadn’t worked so hard to get the doctors their due recognition to have funding split between laboratories that would doubtlessly duplicate each other’s work. She decided to look into allocating that funding herself, but that was a matter for another day. Right now, she had a lunch date with Hap Arnold and Clayton Knight, the acting head of an American recruiting committee for the British Ferry Command.
It wasn’t long before the lunch conversation turned to serious matters. Europe was at war, and while the United States remained committed to isolationism, it seemed increasingly likely the country would be forced to join the conflict eventually. As such, America had recently opened the first peacetime draft in history, forcing millions of young men to join the service. But Britain was in bad shape, even with its Commonwealth allies—Canada, Australia, New Zealand, and a host of other countries—fighting by its side. The nearly four-months-long Battle of Britain earlier that year had brought heavy bombing as the Germans attempted to destroy the Royal Air Force and weaken Britain’s defenses with the goal of gaining this final stronghold before expanding across the Atlantic. Hitler’s army hadn’t managed to invade the island, but Britain had suffered devastating losses. It was now buying planes and munitions from America under President Roosevelt’s Cash-and-Carry p
rogram and flying planes out of Canada since the Royal Canadian Air Force was closely linked to the Royal Air Force. But Britain was running out of gold and couldn’t wait for the United States to join the war and come to its aid. It needed more supplies now. To this end, President Roosevelt had that very day announced the Lend-Lease program, under which America would supply Britain what it needed with the understanding that repayment would come later. The United States had already agreed to send some bombers overseas, and Clayton and Hap wanted Jackie to pilot one of them across the Atlantic. It was a practical mission, and having Jackie, the award-winning, record-setting, beautiful aviatrix at the controls could also bring positive publicity to the need for more pilots.
Jackie could barely believe her ears. She would happily be the AAF’s poster girl for patriotism, and as a pilot, she was thrilled at the idea of flying a bomber across the Atlantic. It was a dream she’d confided in Floyd nearly a year earlier. They didn’t have to ask twice. Jackie accepted without hesitation and Floyd, though slightly nervous about his love flying into a war zone, nonetheless threw his full support behind her. But it wasn’t just the flight that excited Jackie. She knew Britain had recruited a small number of female pilots to help with the war effort; they ferried planes for the Royal Air Force, freeing male pilots for combat in the process. She thought it might be interesting to visit this Air Transport Auxiliary and see firsthand how women were contributing to the war. America might need a similar program in the future.
While the bureaucratic wheels began turning to clear a female civilian pilot to fly a US bomber from Canada to Britain, Jackie returned to the question of Roosevelt’s promised funding for aviation medicine. She wanted the money to go to Randolph Field in Texas, the lab that had produced Randy Lovelace. She also knew that the funding would be allocated by Congress. To help direct the funds, she decided to meet with some Texas congressmen who would, she hoped, take her advice. The first name on her list was Lyndon Baines Johnson, a fairly new congressman whose schedule was open. Lyndon, who took inspiration from FDR to go by his initials of LBJ, had earned a reputation as a shrewd politician whose trademarks included a Stetson hat and the habit of dictating memos from the toilet.
Jackie traveled to Washington and met with LBJ in his small attic office in the old House Office Building. She explained the issue, he asked pointed questions, and before long, Jackie was blurting out everything she knew about the national need to prioritize aviation medicine lest America lose its technological preeminence.
“I will give it every single thing I have,” Lyndon promised. “And we’ll see if we can’t get your aviation school of medicine funded and done properly.” Then he paused and considered her for a moment. “You know, this is refreshing, to have a person come in on a thing of this magnitude, and you are very young!”
“I look younger than I am, probably,” she replied. “I’ve been around a long time, working. And this needs very badly to be done.”
“You fly too, don’t you?”
“Oh, yes, sir, I fly.”
Jackie and Lyndon, both notorious for valuing beneficial friendships, each recognized they’d made a new ally that day.
* * *
On March 8, 1941, FDR’s Lend-Lease program was signed into law, so while America was still not directly involved in the conflict, it was participating nonetheless. That meant there was nothing stopping Jackie from making her bomber flight. Her biggest roadblock was pushback from Royal Air Force officials who questioned whether a woman should—or even could—fly an overseas ferrying mission. Her résumé spoke volumes with more than two thousand hours in the air, multiple ratings, a handful of records, and three Harmon Trophy wins. What she didn’t have was experience with a twin-motor heavy plane like the one she’d be flying to Britain. And so she practiced. She took a captain’s course with Northeast Airlines, gaining experience flying bigger planes at night, on instruments, with one engine, and through adverse weather. With Floyd’s help, she got her hands on a Lockheed Lodestar for additional practice. Experience gained, Jackie put pressure on the British Ferry Command to formalize her appointment. As luck would have it, Britain’s minister for wartime aircraft production and procurement, Lord Beaverbrook, was an old friend of Floyd’s. Once he stepped in, Jackie’s appointment was approved. She would work with the British Ferry Command flying out of Montreal, Canada. She left for her wartime assignment on June 16.
Jackie arrived at the Royal Canadian Air Force station at St. Hubert outside Montreal to find a Lockheed Hudson bomber waiting for her. She also found a score of angry male pilots. She knew there would be resistance to her on account of her gender, but she wasn’t prepared for their outright hostility. Pilots openly challenged her very presence at the airbase. They taunted her, cut the seat belts from her cockpits, called her a publicity stunt, and gleefully warned her she’d be shot out of the sky as soon as the Germans found out she was a female pilot. They even went so far as to say that her flying a bomber was akin to taking bread out of their mouths. Jackie knew she had every right to be there and was as competent a pilot as any of the men, but she was nevertheless bothered enough to need an escape. She rented a car and sat out in the parking lot alone between flights, her own little haven free from sidelong glances and muttered insults.
It fell to an RCAF pilot named Captain Cipher to check her out in the Hudson and clear her for the overseas flight, and he was visibly unhappy about the assignment. He grudgingly took her up in the air, showing her the ins and outs of the bomber with as little explanation as possible. His lack of instruction forced Jackie to pay close attention to his movements, committing everything he did to memory so she could duplicate it herself. Then he asked her to land from the back seat, a wholly unconventional arrangement since, from that position, the handbrake was so low on the floor it was nearly out of reach. She had to lean so far over to engage it during landing that she couldn’t see where she was going, not to mention it took considerable muscle to control the plane in the process. Regardless, she managed, and after nearly a dozen flights decided they were done for the day. She began taxiing the plane toward the hangar, but Captain Cipher apparently disagreed. He demanded she return to the runway and keep flying.
“I’m going to go in and tell you what I think of you!” Jackie shouted, her temper boiling over. “You are going to give me a ticket right now on this airplane, or I am going to turn you in and when I get through with you, you’ll wish you never heard my name.”
“Who do you think you are?” he demanded, matching her anger.
“I mean a hell of a lot more to aviation than you do, boy!” She challenged him to land the plane from where she’d been sitting. He did, three times, nearly crashing on the final landing.
Captain Cipher ultimately wrote Jackie’s ticket clearing her for the flight, though he made the insulting recommendation she only pilot the plane in the air; she shouldn’t take off or land. At least she was approved to fly, but finding her a crew was another matter. Hardly anyone wanted to serve on a woman’s crew. Captain Grafton Carlisle and a radio operator named Coats, however, didn’t mind at all, even when the other pilots threatened to quit in protest and conspired to bar them from flying professionally after the war. To them, a good pilot was a good pilot, regardless of sex.
Just days after her arrival in Canada, it was time for Jackie to fly the bomber to Britain. But the journey got off to a challenging start. When she arrived at the airport around midnight the day of her transatlantic flight, she found the emergency tank of antifreeze for her propellers was empty, her life raft was gone, and her tools had been stolen. She didn’t make a scene. Instead, she just went out, bought a new all-purpose wrench from a nearby mechanic, and resumed her preflight checks. Captain Carlisle made an incident-free takeoff before handing the controls to Jackie for their first leg to Gander, Newfoundland, where they spent the night. The next morning, Jackie woke up to find one of her windows was broken and her wrench was missing. She wanted to scream, but instead, she tape
d it up and bought another wrench from a secondhand store, which she suspected was the same one that had just been stolen. Once again, Captain Carlisle got them into the air.
Jackie maintained a steady 135 miles per hour across the Atlantic. It was a dull flight made mildly more interesting by clouds. Then, right before daybreak, tracer bullets shot up in front of and around them. Jackie froze while her crew sprung into action. Someone grabbed a Very pistol and fired a color-coded signal, hoping that the fire was friendly and would stop upon seeing the flare. After a moment, the bullets stopped. Through a break in the clouds, Jackie could see smoke rising up from a ship on the water, obviously in distress. She couldn’t tell if it was a German or English ship, or if it was even a military ship at all. It was her first view of the devastation of war, and she felt helpless. Finally, the coast of Ireland came into view, and Jackie felt her whole body relax. She had never been happier to see land. After a brief stop, they made their final leg to land at an airbase in Prestwick, Scotland, the endpoint for the North Atlantic ferry routes.
From Prestwick, Jackie traveled to London, where congratulatory letters poured in. Women wrote that they felt a surge of pride for her every time they used a product from her cosmetics line. A telegram from the Royal Air Force thanked her for the bomber and extended a standing invitation for her to return anytime with another one. Floyd telegrammed, simply, that his heart was filled with pride. Though British officials had tried to impose their rule of silence on her military flight, the media got wind of America’s flying glamour girl. Journalists clamored to get into her hotel room for an interview, but she made them wait as she changed into a dress and refreshed her makeup. When she did speak to the media, she downplayed the drama of her training, called the Lockheed Hudson a “grand” plane, and shaved three years off her age, telling the world she was thirty-two. Amid the hubbub, Jackie made sure to take a moment and realize what she had just accomplished.
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