Florence Leontine Lowe grew up on a Pasadena estate so grand it employed 26 servants. She married a minister at 18, had a son, and then, in 1928, dressed as a man and escaped on a banana boat to Mexico under the name “Pancho.” She was 26 years old and she was already bored with respectable life. Aviation, she had just decided, was where she belonged.

She returned from Mexico, bought her first aircraft, and taught herself to fly. Within months she was performing stunts for Hollywood studios — the first woman to do so. She flew for Wings (1927), for Hell’s Angels (1930), and for dozens of other productions. She was fearless, talented, and completely uninterested in performing within anyone else’s rules. Hollywood directors loved her and feared her in equal measure.

In August 1930, at the National Air Races in Chicago, she climbed into a Travel Air Model R “Mystery Ship” and set a new women’s airspeed record of 196.19 mph — beating Amelia Earhart’s existing record by four miles per hour. She did it on her first serious racing attempt. The flight demonstrated what Hollywood directors had suspected: Barnes didn’t just fly aircraft for show. She flew them at their limits.

The Happy Bottom Riding Club

She eventually settled in the Mojave Desert near Muroc Dry Lake — later Edwards Air Force Base — and built a ranch she called the Happy Bottom Riding Club. It became the unofficial headquarters of American test pilot culture in the late 1940s and 1950s. Chuck Yeager drank there. Scott Crossfield drank there. Every test pilot who passed through Muroc passed through Pancho’s bar. When Yeager broke the sound barrier in October 1947, it was at the Happy Bottom that the celebration took place.

The Air Force eventually wanted her land for a runway extension. When she refused to sell at their price, they bulldozed the ranch, claiming it was a fire hazard. She sued the US government and settled out of court. She spent her final years in relative obscurity in Cantil, California, occasionally visited by old test pilots who remembered what the Happy Bottom had meant to them.

Tom Wolfe immortalised Pancho Barnes in The Right Stuff — one of the most vivid characters in a book full of extraordinary people. Sam Shepard played her in the 1983 film. But the real Pancho Barnes was larger than any Hollywood characterisation. She was the granddaughter of the man who co-invented the hang glider, a woman who escaped respectability on a banana boat, set world speed records in the 1930s, and became the patron saint of American test pilot culture — all before anyone thought to call any of it extraordinary.