{"id":17424261,"date":"2026-08-28T10:27:00","date_gmt":"2026-08-28T08:27:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/migflug.com\/afterburner\/?p=17424261"},"modified":"2026-09-04T08:46:01","modified_gmt":"2026-09-04T06:46:01","slug":"cornelia-fort-pearl-harbor-wafs-first-woman-pilot-killed","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/migflug.com\/afterburner\/cornelia-fort-pearl-harbor-wafs-first-woman-pilot-killed\/","title":{"rendered":"Cornelia Fort: Airborne Over Pearl Harbor, Killed Ferrying a Trainer"},"content":{"rendered":"<style>.et_pb_title_container h1.entry-title { padding-top: 40px !important; }<\/style>\n<!-- mfsh:top -->\n\n<style>\n.mfsh-trigger{display:inline-flex;align-items:center;gap:10px;height:44px;padding:0 18px;margin:0 0 26px;border:2px solid #0F1720;background:#fff;color:#0F1720;font-family:inherit;font-size:14px;font-weight:700;line-height:1;letter-spacing:0;text-transform:none;cursor:pointer;box-shadow:none;transition:background .15s,color 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She was 22, a civilian flight instructor with the Andrew Flying Service, and she was in an Interstate Cadet \u2014 a 65-horsepower two-seater, tail number N37345.<\/p>\r\n\r\n<p>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.<\/p>\r\n\r\n\r\n<div style=\"background:#f8f9fa;border-left:4px solid #5C91FF;padding:20px 22px;margin:18px 0 24px;border-radius:0 8px 8px 0;font-size:16px;line-height:1.7;display:flex;gap:20px;align-items:flex-start\"><div><em>&ldquo;The painted red balls on the tops of the wings shone brightly in the sun. I looked again with complete and utter disbelief. Honolulu was familiar with the emblem of the Rising Sun on passenger ships but not on airplanes.&rdquo;<\/em><div style=\"margin-top:10px;font-size:14px;color:#555\"><strong>Cornelia Fort<\/strong> &mdash; &ldquo;At the Twilight&rsquo;s Last Gleaming&rdquo;, <em>Woman&rsquo;s Home Companion<\/em>, 1943, published after her death<\/div><\/div><\/div>\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n<div style=\"background:#f5f5f5;padding:20px 22px;margin:24px 0;border-radius:8px\"><p style=\"margin:0 0 10px;font-weight:700;font-size:15px;letter-spacing:.04em;text-transform:uppercase;color:#333\">Quick Facts<\/p><p style=\"margin:5px 0;font-size:15px\"><strong>Born:<\/strong> 5 February 1919, Nashville, Tennessee<\/p><p style=\"margin:5px 0;font-size:15px\"><strong>Died:<\/strong> 21 March 1943, near Merkel, Texas, aged 24<\/p><p style=\"margin:5px 0;font-size:15px\"><strong>On 7 December 1941:<\/strong> Airborne over Oahu in an Interstate Cadet, N37345, from John Rodgers Airport<\/p><p style=\"margin:5px 0;font-size:15px\"><strong>Service:<\/strong> Women&rsquo;s Auxiliary Ferrying Squadron (WAFS), formed 10 September 1942 under Nancy Harkness Love<\/p><p style=\"margin:5px 0;font-size:15px\"><strong>Status:<\/strong> Civilian. WAFS pilots were civilian employees attached to the Army Air Forces, with no rank and no benefits<\/p><p style=\"margin:5px 0;font-size:15px\"><strong>Final flight:<\/strong> Ferrying a Vultee BT-13 from Long Beach toward Dallas<\/p><p style=\"margin:5px 0;font-size:15px\"><strong>Distinction:<\/strong> The first American woman pilot to die while flying on active duty for the U.S. military<\/p><p style=\"margin:5px 0;font-size:15px\"><strong>Memorial:<\/strong> Cornelia Fort Airpark, Nashville, opened 1945, closed 2011<\/p><\/div>\r\n\r\n\r\n<h2 style=\"padding-top:22px\">Nashville<\/h2>\r\n\r\n<p>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.<\/p>\r\n\r\n<p>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.<\/p>\r\n\r\n<h2 style=\"padding-top:22px\">Strafed on the ground<\/h2>\r\n\r\n<p>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.<\/p>\r\n\r\n<p>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.<\/p>\r\n\r\n\r\n<figure class=\"wp-block-image size-large\" style=\"margin:0 0 24px;width:100%\"><img decoding=\"async\" class=\"skip-lazy\" data-no-lazy=\"1\" loading=\"eager\" width=\"1024\" src=\"https:\/\/migflug.com\/afterburner\/wp-content\/uploads\/sites\/4\/2026\/08\/interstate-cadet-heritage-flight-museum-scaled.jpg\" alt=\"An Interstate Cadet, the type Cornelia Fort was flying on 7 December 1941\" style=\"width:100%;height:auto;max-width:100%;display:block;border-radius:6px\"><figcaption style=\"font-size:13px;color:#777;text-align:center;margin-top:6px;font-style:italic\">An Interstate Cadet of the type Fort was instructing in over Oahu &mdash; 65 horsepower, fabric and tube, and briefly the only American aircraft in the air over Pearl Harbor. Photo: Articseahorse \/ Wikimedia Commons, CC BY-SA 4.0<\/figcaption><\/figure>\r\n\r\n\r\n<p>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.<\/p>\r\n\r\n<h2 style=\"padding-top:22px\">The WAFS, and what it actually was<\/h2>\r\n\r\n<p>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.<\/p>\r\n\r\n<p>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 \u2014 nearly five months after Cornelia Fort was dead. She was never a WASP.<\/p>\r\n\r\n<p>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 \u2014 retroactively, and to the survivors.<\/p>\r\n\r\n\r\n<figure class=\"wp-block-image size-large\" style=\"margin:0 0 24px;width:100%\"><img decoding=\"async\" class=\"skip-lazy\" data-no-lazy=\"1\" loading=\"eager\" width=\"1024\" src=\"https:\/\/migflug.com\/afterburner\/wp-content\/uploads\/sites\/4\/2026\/08\/wafs-pilots-bt-13-march-1943-cornelia-fort.jpg\" alt=\"WAFS pilots on a BT-13, 7 March 1943\" style=\"width:100%;height:auto;max-width:100%;display:block;border-radius:6px\"><figcaption style=\"font-size:13px;color:#777;text-align:center;margin-top:6px;font-style:italic\">WAFS pilots on a Vultee BT-13 on 7 March 1943 &mdash; Cornelia Fort second from left. Two weeks later she was killed ferrying the same type. Photo: U.S. Air Force, public domain<\/figcaption><\/figure>\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n<div style=\"position:relative;padding-bottom:56.25%;height:0;overflow:hidden;margin:24px 0\"><iframe class=\"skip-lazy\" data-no-lazy=\"1\" loading=\"eager\" src=\"https:\/\/www.youtube.com\/embed\/TVrnw1NB3y0\" style=\"position:absolute;top:0;left:0;width:100%;height:100%;border:0;border-radius:8px\" allowfullscreen><\/iframe><\/div>\r\n\r\n\r\n<p style=\"font-size:14px;color:#666;font-style:italic;margin-top:-8px\">Nashville PBS on Cornelia Fort &mdash; the fullest account of her Tennessee background and what she went back to.<\/p>\r\n\r\n<h2 style=\"padding-top:22px\">Mulberry Canyon<\/h2>\r\n\r\n<p>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.<\/p>\r\n\r\n<p>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.<\/p>\r\n\r\n<p>She was 24. She is buried at Mount Olivet Cemetery in Nashville. The footstone reads: Killed in the Service of Her Country.<\/p>\r\n\r\n\r\n<div style=\"background:#f8f9fa;border-left:4px solid #1565c0;padding:20px 22px;margin:18px 0 24px;border-radius:0 8px 8px 0;font-size:16px;line-height:1.7;display:flex;gap:20px;align-items:flex-start\"><div><em>&ldquo;I, for one, am profoundly grateful that my one talent, my only knowledge, flying, happens to be of use to my country when it is needed. That&rsquo;s all the luck I ever hope to have.&rdquo;<\/em><div style=\"margin-top:10px;font-size:14px;color:#555\"><strong>Cornelia Fort<\/strong> &mdash; the closing lines of &ldquo;At the Twilight&rsquo;s Last Gleaming&rdquo;, 1943<\/div><\/div><\/div>\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n<div style=\"position:relative;padding-bottom:56.25%;height:0;overflow:hidden;margin:24px 0\"><iframe class=\"skip-lazy\" data-no-lazy=\"1\" loading=\"eager\" src=\"https:\/\/www.youtube.com\/embed\/u0L5bsvTee4\" style=\"position:absolute;top:0;left:0;width:100%;height:100%;border:0;border-radius:8px\" allowfullscreen><\/iframe><\/div>\r\n\r\n\r\n<p style=\"font-size:14px;color:#666;font-style:italic;margin-top:-8px\">The Commemorative Air Force&rsquo;s short telling of the Pearl Harbor flight.<\/p>\r\n\r\n<h2 style=\"padding-top:22px\">What is left<\/h2>\r\n\r\n<p>Nashville named an airfield after her in 1945 \u2014 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.<\/p>\r\n\r\n<p>She was inducted into the Women in Aviation International Pioneer Hall of Fame in 2022, seventy-nine years after she died.<\/p>\r\n\r\n\r\n<div style=\"position:relative;padding-bottom:56.25%;height:0;overflow:hidden;margin:24px 0\"><iframe class=\"skip-lazy\" data-no-lazy=\"1\" loading=\"eager\" src=\"https:\/\/www.youtube.com\/embed\/Bo-H-Gp3d6A\" style=\"position:absolute;top:0;left:0;width:100%;height:100%;border:0;border-radius:8px\" allowfullscreen><\/iframe><\/div>\r\n\r\n\r\n<p>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.<\/p>\r\n\r\n<p><em>Sources: Cornelia Fort, &ldquo;At the Twilight&rsquo;s Last Gleaming&rdquo;, <\/em>Woman&rsquo;s Home Companion<em>, 1943, reproduced by PBS <\/em>American Experience<em>; her flight logbook, The Woman&rsquo;s Collection, Texas Woman&rsquo;s University, via <\/em>Smithsonian Air &amp; Space<em>; Rob Simbeck, <\/em>Daughter of the Air<em> (1999); Tennessee Encyclopedia; Commemorative Air Force; Wikipedia cross-checks.<\/em><\/p>\n<!-- mfsh:bottom -->\n\n<button type=\"button\" class=\"mfsh-trigger mfsh-bottom\" data-mfsh-placement=\"bottom\" aria-haspopup=\"dialog\"><svg><use href=\"#mfsh-i-share\"\/><\/svg>Share this story<\/button>\n\n<!-- \/mfsh:bottom -->\n\r\n\r\n\r\n<div style=\"background:#f0f4ff;border-left:4px solid #5C91FF;padding:16px 20px;margin:32px 0 8px;border-radius:0 8px 8px 0\"><p style=\"margin:0 0 8px;font-weight:600;color:#333\">Related Posts<\/p><p style=\"margin:4px 0\"><a href=\"https:\/\/migflug.com\/afterburner\/jacqueline-cochran-she-founded-the-wasps-then-broke-the-sound-barrier\/\">Jacqueline Cochran: She Founded the WASPs, Then Broke the Sound Barrier<\/a><\/p><p style=\"margin:4px 0\"><a href=\"https:\/\/migflug.com\/afterburner\/jerrie-mock-first-woman-solo-around-the-world-1964\/\">Jerrie Mock: The First Woman to Fly Solo Around the World<\/a><\/p><p style=\"margin:4px 0\"><a href=\"https:\/\/migflug.com\/afterburner\/betty-skelton-little-stinker-aerobatics-land-speed-records\/\">Betty Skelton: Aerobatic Champion, Then Land Speed Record Holder<\/a><\/p><\/div>\r\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>She was instructing over Oahu on 7 December 1941 when the first wave arrived, and was shot at twice before nine in the morning. Fifteen months later she was dead in a Texas canyon.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":24,"featured_media":17423578,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"editor_notices":[],"footnotes":""},"categories":[666],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-17424261","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-history-and-legends"],"yoast_head":"<!-- This site is optimized with the Yoast SEO plugin v28.5 - https:\/\/yoast.com\/product\/yoast-seo-wordpress\/ -->\n<title>Cornelia Fort: Airborne Over Pearl Harbor | MiGFlug<\/title>\n<meta name=\"description\" content=\"Cornelia Fort was instructing over Oahu on 7 December 1941. 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