She was born Bessie Lee Pittman, around May 11, 1906, in Muscogee, Florida, the youngest of five children of Ira Pittman, a skilled millwright who moved the family from one small logging or mill town to the next through the Florida panhandle as work demanded. The family was poor but not destitute, and food was always on the table. None of that would matter to her public story, because she would spend the rest of her life pretending it did not exist.
At around eight years old she was working in the cotton mill. By nine she had dropped out of school to work full time. At ten she left for a live-in position at a beauty salon. She briefly studied nursing, decided against it, and returned to hairdressing. She struggled with reading and writing throughout her life, a fact she kept as carefully hidden as her origins.
Around 1920, when she was thirteen or fourteen years old, she married Robert Cochran, a young aircraft mechanic from the naval base at Pensacola. The marriage was recorded in Blakeley, Georgia on November 13, 1920. A son, Robert Jr., was born four months later.
She left the child with her family and returned to work in Montgomery, Alabama. In 1925, not quite five years old, Robert Jr. died after he set his clothes on fire while playing alone in the backyard of his grandparents' home in Florida. Jackie returned for the funeral, stayed a short time, then left. She boarded a train for New York. Bessie Pittman Cochran got on that train. The woman who stepped off at Grand Central had a different name, a different history, and a different future planned. She kept the Cochran surname, began using Jacqueline as her first name, and filed for divorce, which was finalized in 1927.
She never spoke publicly about her son.
In her posthumously published autobiography, she claimed she had chosen the name Cochran from a phone book because it had the right ring to it. That was fiction, as so much of her official biography was. The truth emerged only after her death, when family members could speak freely. She had also told people for decades that she was an orphan who had been raised by a foster family. She was not. The Pittman family was her real family, and she quietly supported them financially for the rest of her life, eventually bringing some of them to live on her California ranch after her second marriage. She instructed them to always say they were her adopted family if anyone asked. She was privately generous and publicly dishonest about the same people simultaneously.
She would later describe her life as a journey from sawdust to stardust. That description was accurate in every way except that she spent most of her life trying to pretend the sawdust had never existed.
She worked her way through increasingly prestigious salons, eventually reaching Antoine's, the fashionable salon within Saks Fifth Avenue stores in New York City and Miami. She was good at her work, ambitious, and had a plan to start her own cosmetics company.
In 1932 she met Floyd Bostwick Odlum at a dinner in Miami. Odlum was the founder of the Atlas Corporation, the CEO of RKO Pictures in Hollywood, and was reported at the time to be one of the ten richest men in the world. When she told him about her cosmetics ambitions, he told her she was going to need wings to cover enough territory to make it work. She took the advice literally. They made a wager: if she could earn her pilot's license in three weeks, Odlum would pay the $495 course fee. She had trouble with the written portion of the examination, so she had a friend help her learn the material and persuaded the instructors to let her take the written test orally.
She earned her license in three weeks, on August 17, 1932, flying a Fleet Trainer at Roosevelt Field on Long Island.
"At that moment, when I paid for my first lesson," she said later, "a beauty operator ceased to exist and an aviator was born."
She immediately pursued advanced instruction at the Ryan School of Aeronautics and built flight time quickly. Within two years she had her commercial license. She named her cosmetics company Wings to Beauty, acquired a Northrop Gamma and flew it around the country promoting her products. She and Odlum married in 1936 after his divorce from a previous marriage. He financed her racing career and in later years used his Hollywood connections to get Marilyn Monroe to endorse her line of lipstick.
Her career was not limited to racing. Throughout the 1930s she flew experimental test flights that most pilots never heard of. In 1934 she flew and tested the first turbo-supercharger ever installed on an aircraft engine. Over the following two years she became the first person to fly and test the forerunner to the Pratt & Whitney 1340 and 1535 engines. She worked with Dr. Randolph Lovelace to help design the first aviation oxygen mask, and then became the first pilot ever to fly above 20,000 feet wearing one. In 1938 she flew and tested the first wet wing ever installed on an aircraft. She made the first flight of the Republic P-43 and recommended a longer tail wheel installation that was later incorporated into every P-47 Thunderbolt built. Between 1935 and 1942 she flew experimental flights for Sperry Corporation testing gyro instruments. She was, in addition to everything else she was, a serious test pilot.
She began entering races. In 1934 she flew in the MacRobertson Air Race from London to Melbourne, one of the longest and most prestigious races in aviation. She flew a Granville Brothers Gee Bee, a notoriously dangerous barrel-shaped racer with almost no fuselage behind the engine. She described it simply: "There were few pilots who flew Gee Bees and then lived to talk about it. Jimmy Doolittle was one. I was another." She and her copilot Wesley Smith had to drop out in Bucharest when the flaps malfunctioned.
She entered the Bendix Transcontinental Race for the first time in 1935 flying her Northrop Gamma and had to drop out due to engine problems. She also established Jacqueline Cochran Cosmetics as a manufacturing operation that same year, with locations in Chicago, Los Angeles, and eventually New York's Fifth Avenue, competing directly with Helena Rubenstein and Elizabeth Arden. She came back to the Bendix in 1937 in her Beechcraft D-17W Staggerwing as the only woman in the race, worked with her close friend Amelia Earhart to keep the race open to women, finished third overall, and set two women's speed records. She was not finished with the Bendix.
On September 23, 1938, she crossed the finish line flying Alexander de Seversky's P-35, covering 2,042 miles from Burbank, California to Cleveland, Ohio in 8 hours, 10 minutes, and 31 seconds. She won the race outright, not just the women's category, and set a new women's transcontinental speed record of 10 hours, 7 minutes, and 10 seconds on the return leg. Before stepping out of the cockpit, she paused to apply lipstick. First Lady Eleanor Roosevelt presented her with the first of what would eventually be 14 Harmon Trophies, the most prestigious award in American aviation. She was named president of the Ninety-Nines, the international organization of licensed women pilots, a position she held from 1941 to 1943 and again for a second term, making her a two-time president of the organization. She was considered the best female pilot in the United States and was acquiring a reputation among male pilots as simply one of the best pilots of any kind.
Her friendship with Earhart was one of the closest of her life. They shared an interest in parapsychology, and when Earhart disappeared over the Pacific in 1937, Cochran later said she had received a psychic impression of her friend's fate that night. Whether one believes in such things or not, the loss was real and lasting.
She did not stop racing or record-setting. In 1939 she set a new women's national altitude record and broke the international open-class speed record for men and women. In 1940 she broke the 2,000 km international speed record and the 100 km national record.
In September 1939, as German forces crossed into Poland, Cochran wrote to Eleanor Roosevelt proposing the creation of a women's flying division in the Army Air Forces. She argued that qualified women pilots could perform all domestic noncombat aviation duties, releasing male pilots for combat. She also wrote directly to Lieutenant Colonel Robert Olds, who was organizing the Ferrying Command for the Air Corps. The military response was polite and noncommittal.
She decided to demonstrate what women pilots could do rather than wait for permission. Before the United States entered the war she joined Wings for Britain, an organization ferrying American-built aircraft to the Royal Air Force. In June 1941 she became the first woman to fly a bomber across the Atlantic, piloting a Lockheed Hudson V from North America to England over nine days. She brought 25 American women pilots with her and placed them with the British Air Transport Auxiliary, where they ferried aircraft throughout Britain and attained the rank of Flight Captain, equivalent to a Major in the US Army. She returned to the United States when President Roosevelt asked her to study the British program and report on whether something similar could be built at home.
She already knew the answer.
In 1942, General Hap Arnold gave her the green light. Cochran went to Sweetwater, Texas and built Avenger Field from the ground up as a training base, starting the first class in November 1942. At almost the same time, another accomplished female pilot, Nancy Harkness Love, had independently proposed a smaller ferrying squadron of already-qualified women pilots, the Women's Auxiliary Ferrying Squadron, or WAFS. The existence of two parallel programs created friction between Cochran and Love. Cochran wanted a large training program producing pilots from scratch; Love's program recruited only experienced pilots. Arnold resolved the tension on July 5, 1943, merging both programs into the Women Airforce Service Pilots 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, towed targets for live gunnery practice, served as test pilots at repair depots, and 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. Cochran presented a report of the program's achievements to Arnold in March 1944 and requested that the WASP be formally militarized and incorporated into the Army Air Forces. Congress voted it down. By late 1944 the tide of the war had shifted, male pilots were lobbying against the women, and on December 20, 1944, the WASP were disbanded and sent home at their own expense with no military status, no veterans' benefits, and no military funerals for the 38 who died in service.
In 1945 Cochran received the Distinguished Service Medal for her direction of the WASP, the first civilian woman to receive the award during World War II.
She had not finished with the war. When her position with Arnold ended she became a war correspondent. Floyd had purchased Liberty magazine specifically to give her that platform. She flew to the Pacific and attended the surrender of Japanese General Tomoyuki Yamashita, becoming the first non-Japanese woman to enter Japan after the war. She traveled to Europe, toured Buchenwald concentration camp, attended the Nuremberg Trials, and bribed her way into the Reich Chancellery in Berlin where she, as she put it, acquired a doorknob.
She returned to racing after the war. She bought a surplus P-51B and came in second in the 1946 Bendix Race, setting a women's speed record of 420 miles per hour, then flew a P-51B to third place in the 1948 Bendix at 445 miles per hour. On September 9, 1948, she was commissioned as a lieutenant colonel in the United States Air Force Reserve. Her role in the Reserve was that of consultant and advisor, not operational pilot. Women were barred from flying military missions entirely until 1976, so regardless of her commission, her military role was advisory. She was, by most accounts, the first woman to hold a pilot's position in the United States Air Force in any capacity.
In December 1949 she acquired a cobalt blue P-51C Mustang racer named Thunderbird from actor and World War II B-24 commander James Stewart for one dollar. 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.
Her friendship with Dwight Eisenhower had deepened after the war. In 1951 she flew film of a political rally to France for a special showing at his European headquarters, and her efforts were considered a significant factor in convincing Eisenhower to run for president in 1952. She played a major role in his successful campaign. Eisenhower regularly visited the Odlums at their California ranch and wrote portions of his memoirs there.
By the early 1950s she had set her sights on the sound barrier. A French pilot named Jacqueline Auriol had been trading speed records with her for several years, the competition fierce and personal, a matter of pride for both women and both nations. Breaking the sound barrier would settle the question definitively. It was also worth noting that she and fellow aviatrix Pancho Barnes, who ran the famous Happy Bottom Riding Club near Edwards Air Force Base, famously could not stand each other. Chuck Yeager, who knew them both well, later confirmed the mutual animosity. Whether that friction played any role in the sound barrier attempt is unrecorded, but Cochran was not a woman who forgot slights or ignored competition from any quarter.
She applied to borrow an F-86 from the United States Air Force and was refused. Women held no flying assignments in the Air Force, Reserve commission or otherwise, and there was no appetite for making an exception regardless of her record. What opened the door was Floyd Odlum, who held an ownership stake in Canadair, the Canadian company that manufactured a licensed version of the F-86 under the name CL-13 Sabre. With the permission of the Canadian Minister of Defence, Canadair loaned her a Sabre Mk.3 and sent a 16-person support team to California to assist. Chuck Yeager agreed to coach her and fly as her chase pilot. Each training flight cost $10,000 in insurance fees, in early 1950s dollars. She paid it without hesitation.
On May 18, 1953, Cochran climbed to 45,000 feet over Edwards Air Force Base in the Mojave Desert with Yeager in the chase plane. Yeager had been the first person to break the sound barrier 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 through a near-vertical full-power dive, blood surging to her brain. She pulled through it. First woman to exceed the speed of sound, at an average speed of 652 miles per hour.
She did not stop there. The rivalry with Jacqueline Auriol continued for years, the two women trading records back and forth as their nations watched. Cochran set additional speed and altitude records throughout the 1950s, became the first woman to fly a jet aircraft across the Atlantic in 1962 in her Lockheed JetStar, which she had named The Scarlett O'Hara, setting 69 intercity and intercapital distance records on that single flight, became the first woman to land and take off from an aircraft carrier, and the first woman to make a blind instrument landing. In 1961 she set an absolute altitude record of 55,253 feet flying a Northrop T-38 Talon — not an Air Force loan this time, but a company-owned aircraft she flew as a Northrop consultant, the same workaround she had used with Canadair eight years earlier. By 1964 the Air Force had finally run out of reasons to say no. Eleven years of record-breaking after the sound barrier, the full backing of Eisenhower and the aviation establishment, and a Reserve colonel's commission had worn down the institutional resistance. The Air Force granted her specific permission to fly a Lockheed F-104G Starfighter for a record attempt. At the age of 58, she set the women's world speed record at 1,429 miles per hour and became the first woman to fly Mach 2, twice the speed of sound. It had taken the Air Force eleven years to give her what Canada had provided in weeks.
From 1958 to 1961 she served as the only woman ever to be president of the Federation Aeronautique Internationale, the governing body of world aviation records, and was re-elected for a second term. She was promoted to colonel in the Air Force Reserve in 1969 and retired from the Reserve in 1970, after which she continued as a special consultant to NASA. During her Reserve career she received three Distinguished Flying Cross awards: the first for her F-51 speed records from 1947 to 1951, the second for the 1962 transatlantic JetStar flight, and the third for additional achievements through 1964.
In 1954 she published her autobiography, The Stars at Noon, written with Floyd Odlum. In it she described her life as a journey from sawdust to stardust. The autobiography maintained the fiction of her orphan origins. The real story, the cotton mill and the boy who died in a Florida backyard, remained buried until after her death.
From 1960 to 1961 she financially sponsored the Lovelace Clinic Women in Space Program, which conducted medical testing on female pilots interested in becoming astronauts, the group that became known as the Mercury 13. The program was run by Dr. Randolph Lovelace, the same man she had worked with decades earlier to design the first oxygen mask. She later testified before a congressional subcommittee against actually sending women into space, possibly, as observers noted, because she was by then too old to go herself.
Politically ambitious, she ran for Congress in 1956 from California's 29th District as the Republican candidate, running under the name Jacqueline Cochran-Odlum. She won the primary against five male opponents and faced Democrat Dalip Singh Saund in the general election. Saund won with 54,989 votes to her 51,690, a margin of about 3,300 votes. Saund became the first Asian American congressman in history. Those who knew Cochran said the loss bothered her for the rest of her life. She never ran again.
In 1965 she was inducted into the International Aerospace Hall of Fame. In 1967 she was diagnosed with heart disease, which ended her jet flying. She continued flying lighter aircraft for a time before a pacemaker grounded her completely. In 1971 she was inducted into the US Aviation Hall of Fame. She was the first woman to be honored with a permanent display of her achievements at the United States Air Force Academy.
In 1973 she and Floyd moved to their home in Indio, California. Floyd Odlum died in 1976, leaving Jackie widowed for the last four years of her life.
She was not always easy to admire without reservation. She founded the WASP and later opposed women joining military academies. She sponsored the Mercury 13 and then testified against women in space. Her personality was described by people who knew her as like sandpaper. The congressional loss produced a comment about her opponent that was as ugly as it sounds. She lied publicly about her origins for most of her life while privately supporting the family she denied having. She was complicated. She was also one of the greatest pilots who ever lived, the woman who commanded the program that put over a thousand women in military cockpits during the most consequential war in history, a test pilot whose recommendations made the P-47 Thunderbolt fly better, someone who spent five decades proving that a girl from a Florida cotton mill could outfly almost everyone on the planet, and a woman who dragged the door open for others even while sometimes trying to close it behind her. All of those things are true simultaneously.
Jacqueline Cochran died on August 9, 1980, at her home in Indio, California. She was 74 years old. She is buried at the Coachella Valley Cemetery. The airport near Indio where she had spent much of her later life was renamed the Jacqueline Cochran Regional Airport in her honor. In 1985 the International Astronomical Union named a crater on Venus after her, 100 kilometers in diameter. In 1996 the United States Post Office issued a 50-cent stamp bearing her image in front of a Bendix Trophy pylon with her P-35 in the background, inscribed "Jacqueline Cochran Pioneer Pilot."
At the time of her death she held more speed, distance, and altitude records than any pilot in history, male or female. Over 200 records. 14 Harmon Trophies. Three Distinguished Flying Cross awards. One Distinguished Service Medal.
Bessie Lee Pittman boarded that train for New York. Jacqueline Cochran was the woman who stepped off. The sawdust was real. So was the stardust.