Jacqueline Cochran waited impatiently in her New York City apartment while a group of men in Canada debated her fate. It was June 1941, and the renowned pilot hoped to ferry an American bomber across the Atlantic and deliver it to the Royal Air Force. Cochran was already well known for daredevil record-breaking flights but she also ran a cosmetics business, activities that might seem incompatible. But while she believed that women were just as good at flying airplanes as men, Cochran also felt it was “a woman’s duty to be as presentable as her circumstances of time and purse permit.” Her own available time might just be a few minutes to comb her hair and daub on fresh lipstick at the end of an 11-hour flight, but Cochran always looked as if she had just stepped out of a beauty salon.
Cochran had done everything possible to prepare for the transatlantic flight. Lacking experience with heavy, multi-engine aircraft like the Lockheed Hudson she planned to fly, she’d received several hours of instruction in a Lodestar, another twin-engine Lockheed. She then flew to the home of the Atlantic Ferry Organization (Atfero) at Saint-Hubert Airport outside Montreal, to train on the Hudson. She passed all her check rides but had some trouble grasping the hand brake used on the ground. Given that difficulty, Atfero officials decided she would fly the bomber as a first officer; she could take the controls once airborne, but a male pilot would takeoff and land. That didn’t please Cochran, but there was nothing she could do about it.
Many Atfero pilots opposed having her make the flight at all, and about 50 of them called a meeting to discuss the “problem.” Cochran’s husband, Floyd Odlum, attended to plead her case while she returned to New York.
The pilots raised multiple objections: they said that Cochran was on a publicity stunt;
