She was born Bessie Lee Pittman, around 1906, in Muscogee, Florida , a mill town in the panhandle, the kind of place that existed to work people until they wore out. Her family was poor even by the standards of poor Florida mill towns, moving from one logging camp to the next as her father chased work. At eight years old she was working in the cotton mill. At nine she dropped out of school to work full time.
By the time she was a teenager she had left home, changed her name to Jacqueline Cochran, and decided that Bessie Pittman from Muscogee was someone else's story.
She would spend the rest of her life making sure almost no one knew who Bessie Pittman was. She told people she was an orphan. She instructed family members who later came to live on her California ranch to say they were her adopted family. The poverty, the mill, the father who moved from camp to camp , she buried all of it under the name she had chosen for herself. Only after her death did the full story of her origins emerge.
After leaving Florida she worked her way through hairdressing salons, eventually landing at the prestigious Antoine's at Saks Fifth Avenue in New York and Miami. Her future husband Floyd Odlum , founder of the Atlas Corporation and CEO of RKO , suggested she learn to fly. The logic was practical: a pilot could cover more sales territory faster for her cosmetics business.
She earned her pilot's license in three weeks.
Most people take months. Cochran absorbed it in three weeks and decided she wanted more. Within a few years she had her commercial license. Then she started racing. On September 23, 1938, her silver Seversky P-35 crossed the finish line of the Bendix Race , a 2,042-mile transcontinental sprint from Los Angeles to Cleveland , in eight hours, ten minutes, and thirty-one seconds. She won outright, not just in the women's category, and became the first pilot ever to complete the Bendix non-stop using an innovative fuel system of her own design. By 1938 she was considered the best female pilot in the United States, holding speed, altitude, and distance records and winning the Harmon Trophy , the most prestigious award in American aviation , five times. She was friends with Amelia Earhart. She was also building a cosmetics empire wealthy enough to fund her flying career entirely on her own terms.
She described her ambitions simply: "I might have been born in a hovel, but I determined to travel with the wind and the stars."
When Germany began rolling across Europe, Cochran was paying attention. In June 1941 she became the first woman to fly a bomber across the Atlantic — a Lockheed Hudson from North America to England — and brought 25 American women pilots with her to train and fly for the British Air Transport Auxiliary. While she was there, President Roosevelt asked her to study whether a similar program could be built in the United States. She already knew the answer.
Back home, Cochran went to General Hap Arnold with a proposal: train civilian women pilots to fly military aircraft domestically, freeing male pilots for combat. Arnold sent her to Sweetwater, Texas, to make it happen. She built Avenger Field as a training base from scratch, started the first class in November 1942, and on July 5, 1943, her program merged with Nancy Harkness Love's Women's Auxiliary Ferrying Squadron to form the Women Airforce Service Pilots — the WASP — with Cochran as director.
Under her command, 1,074 women flew over 60 million miles. They ferried every aircraft in the Army Air Forces inventory including B-17 and B-29 bombers. They towed targets for live gunnery practice. They served as test pilots at repair depots. They trained navigators and bombardiers. In January 1944, the War Department confirmed it officially: the WASP had a lower fatal and non-fatal accident rate than their male counterparts.
It didn't matter. By late 1944 the tide of the war had shifted. Fewer combat pilots were being lost. Male pilots competing for domestic assignments organized against the WASP, lobbied Congress, and argued the women weren't needed. On December 20, 1944, the WASP were disbanded. The women were sent home at their own expense with no military status, no veterans' benefits, and no military funerals for the 38 who died in service. It would take 33 years — and a hard-fought lobbying campaign by the surviving WASP veterans, with Senator Barry Goldwater as their champion in Congress — before President Jimmy Carter signed the bill granting them the military status they had earned. Goldwater had flown alongside WASP pilots as a ferry pilot during the war and never forgot what they had done.
Cochran kept flying after the disbandment. In December 1949 she bought a cobalt blue P-51C Mustang racer named Thunderbird from actor and WWII B-24 commander James Stewart — one dollar and other consideration. On April 9, 1951, she flew Thunderbird to an average speed of 464 miles per hour over a straight course at Indio, California, setting the FAI world speed record for propeller-driven aircraft. She was commissioned as a lieutenant colonel in the Air Force Reserve in 1948. Then on May 18, 1953, she climbed to 45,000 feet in a Canadair F-86 Sabre over the Mojave Desert with Chuck Yeager in the chase plane. Yeager had broken the sound barrier first, in 1947, in the Bell X-1 over the same desert. He knew what the numbers meant. He listened as Cochran read them aloud on the way down — the altimeter unwinding, the Machmeter climbing as she pushed into a nearly vertical full-power dive. Face down with blood surging to her brain, she pulled through it. First woman to break the sound barrier. She later reached Mach 2 in a Lockheed F-104 Starfighter.
At the time of her death on August 9, 1980, Jacqueline Cochran held more speed, altitude, and distance records than any other pilot in aviation history — male or female. Over 200 records across four decades of flying.
She was not always easy to admire without reservation. She founded the WASP and later opposed women joining military academies. She helped fund medical testing for women who wanted to become astronauts and then opposed actually sending women into space. Her personality was described by people who knew her as "like sandpaper." She lost a congressional race and reportedly never fully recovered from losing to, in her words, "a Hindu" — her opponent was in fact Sikh, and the comment was as ugly as it sounds. She was complicated. She was also the woman who built the program that put over a thousand women in military cockpits during the most consequential war in history. Both things are true.
When she was finally grounded by a pacemaker in the early 1970s, Cochran bought a large recreational vehicle and drove it, according to friends, like an airplane all over the country.
The airport in the Coachella Valley near where she lived and died is named Jacqueline Cochran Regional Airport.
Bessie Pittman from the Florida cotton mill gave herself a name worth remembering. She made sure more than a thousand other women got the chance to do the same.