Just before eight on the morning of 7 December 1941, Cornelia Fort was doing touch-and-goes over Oahu with a student. She was 22, a civilian flight instructor with the Andrew Flying Service, and she was in an Interstate Cadet — a 65-horsepower two-seater, tail number N37345.

Something came at them fast enough that she took the controls off her student and hauled the little aeroplane over the top of it. As it passed underneath she looked down at the wings.

Nashville

She was the fourth of five children of a wealthy Nashville family. Her father, a founder of the National Life and Accident Insurance Company, made her three brothers swear never to fly. He never thought to ask his daughter.

She took her first lesson in 1940, shortly after he died, and soloed within a month. Inside two years she was Tennessee's first female flight instructor, taught under the Civilian Pilot Training Program in Colorado, and in September 1941 took a job in Honolulu.

Strafed on the ground

What happened next is in her logbook, which survives at Texas Woman's University. She landed as fast as she could. A Japanese aircraft fired at her in the air and missed; another machine-gunned the ground in front of her as she taxied back to the hangar.

She got down. Robert Tyce, who ran the K-T Flying Service at the same field, was shot dead outside his hangar. Two other civilian aircraft that were airborne that morning never came back.

Civilian flying in Hawaii was grounded, and after about three months she came home to a war-bond publicity tour she disliked. What she wanted was to fly.

The WAFS, and what it actually was

On 10 September 1942 the Air Transport Command's Ferrying Division established the Women's Auxiliary Ferrying Squadron under Nancy Harkness Love, based at New Castle Army Air Base in Delaware. Its job was to move new aircraft from factories to the units that needed them, freeing male pilots for combat. Fort was among the first women accepted and among the first to report.

It is worth being exact about this, because the terminology gets flattened constantly. The WAFS was not the WASP. The Women Airforce Service Pilots came into being on 5 August 1943, by merging the WAFS with Jacqueline Cochran's training detachment — nearly five months after Cornelia Fort was dead. She was never a WASP.

Nor was she, strictly, in the military. WAFS and WASP pilots were civilian employees. No rank, no insurance, no benefits, and when one of them was killed the government did not pay to send the body home. Militarisation, and veteran status, came in 1977 — retroactively, and to the survivors.

Nashville PBS on Cornelia Fort — the fullest account of her Tennessee background and what she went back to.

Mulberry Canyon

In January 1943 she transferred to the 6th Ferrying Group at Long Beach, California. On 21 March she was one of a group ferrying BT-13 trainers east toward Love Field in Dallas.

Ferry pilots were forbidden to fly close formation. They were flying close formation. The landing gear of a BT-13 flown by Flight Officer Frank Stamme Jr. struck Fort's left wing, taking off the tip and about six feet of the leading edge. The aircraft went into a dive she could not recover from and hit the ground in Mulberry Canyon, roughly ten miles south of Merkel, Texas.

She was 24. She is buried at Mount Olivet Cemetery in Nashville. The footstone reads: Killed in the Service of Her Country.

The Commemorative Air Force’s short telling of the Pearl Harbor flight.

What is left

Nashville named an airfield after her in 1945 — Cornelia Fort Airpark, on land near the family farm. It flooded in 2010 and the city bought it in 2011, folding it into Shelby Bottoms park. There is a marker. The runway is a greenway now.

She was inducted into the Women in Aviation International Pioneer Hall of Fame in 2022, seventy-nine years after she died.

Of the 1,012 women who flew in the programme, 38 were killed, and for decades the country they flew for did not count them as veterans. Cornelia Fort was the first of them to die. She had been airborne over Pearl Harbor with a student and a 65-horsepower trainer, had been shot at twice before nine in the morning, and had come home and asked to do more.

Sources: Cornelia Fort, “At the Twilight’s Last Gleaming”, Woman’s Home Companion, 1943, reproduced by PBS American Experience; her flight logbook, The Woman’s Collection, Texas Woman’s University, via Smithsonian Air & Space; Rob Simbeck, Daughter of the Air (1999); Tennessee Encyclopedia; Commemorative Air Force; Wikipedia cross-checks.