It's no longer there, but for many years there was an airport located on the Cumberland River in Nashville, Tennessee called Cornelia Fort Airpark. It was named for Nashville native Cornelia Clark Fort, a 24-year-old commercial pilot who was touted as the first woman pilot employed by the US Army to die on duty. Miss Fort was not in the Army, but was employed by the Army Air Transport Command Ferrying Division as a civilian ferry pilot. Although they claim her, she was never a WASP, the Womens Airforce Service Pilots. At the time of her death, the WAFS and WASP, which was a training program, were seperate. She was a Civil Service Employee and was not in the military. Furthermore, she was not the first woman pilot employed by the Army to die. A trainee in the WASP program set up by aviatrix Jackie Cochran died along with her instructor in an accident in Houston two weeks before Fort perished near Abilene. The first woman's death was not widely reported. Fort's was because she was notorious for having been in the air in the vicinity of Pearl Harbor when the Japanese attacked on December 7, 1941. 

 

Cornelia Fort was born and raised in Nashville. Her father was a founder of the National Life and Accident Insurance Company, which owned WSM radio station, the station that hosted the famous Grand Ole Opry radio broadcast. She grew up wealthy and was educated at the prestigious Ward-Belmont girls school in Nashville and the exclusive Ogontz School for Girls, a finishing school near Philadelphia. Amelia Earhart had attended the school but didn't graduate due to a dispute with faculty. The family lived in a Grecian-style mansion near the Cumberland River on the outskirts of Nashville and she enjoyed the outdoors and outdoor activities, including fox hunting. (Fox hunting with horses and hounds was a popular sport among English aristocracy and wealthy Americans.) She loved dogs and horses. Yet after Ogontz she went to New York to Sarah Lawrence, an extremely liberal school in Bronxville in prestigious Westchester County New York where the wealthy sent their daughters. Sarah Lawrence was where she wanted to go originally but her father insisted she go to the finishing school. However, her mother convinced her father to let her make her own decision. She did not graduate from Sarah Lawrence, she left the school after two years and returned to Nashville where she entered society. She was opposed to being a debutante but relented, then had so much fun at the after-party she decided not to go back to school but to stay in Nashville with her friends and become a society girl. Her father was afraid of airplanes and after taking them to an air show, extracted a promise from her three brothers that they would not learn to fly. Cornelia, who was five, wasn't part of the conversation but she overheard it. Perhaps because of this, Cornelia, who had an independent streak, became interested in airplanes. After she returned to Nashville, she started taking flying lessons at an airport in Nashville on the sly. She went to the airport with one of her friends, whose boyfriend was a flight instructor and part owner of a fixed base operator at Berry Field, for an introductry ride in a Piper Cub. She was so enthralled with flying she wanted to start lessons immediately and took her first lesson that afternoon. However, her friend didn't want to instruct her so he assigned her to the company chief instructor and switched her to a Luscombe, which had side-by-side seating as opposed to the Cub's tandem seats. When her brothers found out and protested, she asserted that their father's mandate had not included her. Her father passed away shortly after she started flying due to heart problems. She continued taking flying lessons and became practically a full-time flight student. She had something others didn't have, money to pay for instruction, so she could fly as often as she wanted. Although she was not a natural flyer, she soon mastered the art of flying and obtained a private pilot's license. 

 

The young woman, who was barely out of her teens, became fascinated with flying and, like many other young American women, decided she wanted to make it her profession. She completed the requirements for a commercial pilot's license then was certified as a flight instructor, the first woman in Tennessee to be so-rated. She was the second Tennessee woman to be rated as a commercial pilot. She sent resumes to every flying school she could come up with and was offered a job at Fort Collins, Colorado as a flight instructor. However, after a few months, she decided to move to Honolulu where she arrived in October 1941. She was kept busy teaching, by her account, soldiers, sailors and defense workers from the airbases and naval facilities on Oahu how to fly. She was flying light single-engine airplanes, primarily Interstate Cadets and Taylorcrafts, which were practically identical to Piper Cubs. She also flew a WACO biplane. 

 

Although flying had become her first love, socialising was definitely second. The first thing she did after she was rated as a private pilot was to fly to several distant cities to see friends from school. Although her family were Episcoplians, which are known for drinking, her father was a teetotaler and she was raised in an alcohol-free environment. She, however, had no aversion to alcohol was a participant in parties at Ogentz and Sarah Lawrence, a practice she continued after she got back to Nashville. Going out eating, drinking and dancing seemed to be her favorite pasttimes in Hawaii. She joined in the daily cocktail hours at New Castle. She would write about her partying in her letters home. While she can't be called a party girl, she was close. She also enjoyed the company of men. The WAFS weren't allowed to socialize with the men at New Castle during their military training and were supposed to avoid male pilots while on ferry flights. Nevertheless, she somehow came to know a lot of men, many of them pilots. Some were men she knew from the airport at Nashville while she was working on her pilot ratings and who had gone into the Army as transport pilots. In Hawaii she had a boyfriend who was an officer in the Navy. She also socialized with other women. Some were friends from school but she had joined the Ninety-Nines, an organization of women pilots founded in 1929 with Amelia Earhart at its first president. 

 

On December 7, 1941, she was aloft with a student in a Cadet when the Japanese attacked Pearl Harbor. She and her student were in the traffic pattern and about to turn on the downwind leg when a military airplane shot by her. She is believed to have been the first pilot to see the attacking Japanese - at least to see them and live. By her account, she spotted a military airplane headed toward her, thinking it was an Army or Navy plane. It was only after she took evasive action to avoid it that she saw the red ball of the Rising Sun and realized it was Japanese. She had seen the red ball on Japanese ships in the harbor. She took control of the airplane from her student - who asked her if he was ready to solo, to which she responded "not today" - and dove for the airport where she landed in the midst of the attack. Airport personnel were not aware that the field was under attack. They laughed at her until they got word Bob Tyce, the owner of the largest operation on the field, K-T Flying Service, was hit by a machinegun bullet and killed. Cornelia Fort suddenly became famous as the first pilot to see the Japanese, a fact she would capitalize on. 

 

After the attack, the military took control of the air over Hawaii and all civilian flying was halted. Unable to continue instructing, Cornelia took a job with the Army as a personnel clerk interviewing civilians applying for jobs on the Army facilities. She wanted to return to the United States where civilian flying was still allowed. Although she liked some aspects of being in tropical Hawaii, she was homesick. She possibly contacted Tennessee Senator K.D. McKellar for assistance arranging passage. However, it wasn't until late January that she was able to obtain passage on a ship bound for San Francisco where she arrived on March 1. Before she left Hawaii, her mother got a telegram from a woman who called herself Jackie Cochran. Her real name was Bessie Pitman but she kept her ex-husband's name after a divorce and started calling herself Jackie. She moved to New York and got a job in a department store in the fragrances department where she met a wealthy executive named Floyd Odlum. The blonde Cochran turned her charms on Odlum who divorced his wife and married her. She convinced her new husband to set her up in the cosmetics business and buy her an airplane. Cochran had made a name for herself in aviation where she seems to have seen herself as an heir of Amelia Earhart (who was also a gold-digger.) Cochran had been trying to get the Army to use women as pilots, without success. She managed to get permission from the British to recruit a contingent of American female pilots to come to England to join the Women's Auxiliary Air Force. Sometime in early 1942 she sent telegrams to women with commercial licenses offering them an opportunity to go to England to join the WAAF. One of those who got a telegram was Cornelia Fort although she was not there to receive it. It's doubtful that Fort would have taken her up on the offer because she had decided she was never going to leave the United States again even though she had a deep aversion to the Nazis in Germany because of their treatment of Jews. After going through the Pearl Harbor attack, she was no fan of the Japanese. Fort returned to the United States and to notoriety. She was interviewed and photographed by the San Francisco newspapers. After giving an account of her Pearl Harbor experience on her family's radio station, WSM in Nashville, she was invited to speak at public functions. She was in a movie promoting the sale of War Bonds. The Treasury Department sent her on a tour of speaking engagements promoting war bonds. She had become perhaps the most famous female pilot in the United States. She returned to Nashville and to flight instruction at a Civilian Pilot Training Program school. She was also involved with the Civil Air Patrol. On the advice of her best friend's husband, she enrolled in a three-month instrument training course with Link Trainers in Binghamton, New York with the idea of becoming an instrument instructor for the Army. Although women weren't ferrying airplanes, they were instructing at military contract schools.

 

Prior to the war, the Roosevelt Administration had begun providing military supplies to the warring nations under the Lend-Lease Program. Airplanes were a major part of the program. Initially, Army pilots flew airplanes from the factories to delivery points where they were picked up by civilian ferry pilots who flew them overseas or where they were loaded on ships. With America's entry into the war and the need for military pilots to form the nucleus for new combat squadrons, a need was created for more civilian contract pilots to ferry airplanes. The Air Corps had set up the Air Corps Ferry Command to meet the needs of Lend-Lease. In early 1942 a reorganization led to the creation of Army Air Transport Command from the headquarters of the former Ferry Command and Ferrying Service was created to ferry airplanes. With Army pilots training for combat, ATC turned to the civilian aviation industry for pilots to ferry airplanes. A new office had been set up in Memphis, Tennessee to recruit crop dusters and other commercial pilots in the South under the command of Major William H. Tunner. Tunner had been promoted to colonel and transferred to Washington where he was given command of the new Ferrying Service. Because Army pilots were needed in combat squadrons, Ferrying Service depended on experienced civilian pilots working under contract to ferry airplanes. The Army came up with a new pilot rating called Service Pilot in 1942. Experienced civilian pilots were hired for 90 days as ferry pilots then those who showed aptitude for military service were rated as "service pilots" and brought into the military to train to fly military transports in the Air Transport Command and for other non-combat duties. (Western movie star Gene Autry enlisted in the Army as a sergeant service pilot then was later given a warrant as a pilot officer. He flew transports over The Hump from India into China.) Those not selected for commissioning were offered the opportunity to continue as contract ferry pilots or instruct at one of the many flying schools that had been set up to train Army pilots. However, they had no military standing. Some civilian ferry pilots were airline employees working for companies that had been given contracts to provide pilots for ferrying. Cornelia knew there were civilian ferry pilots based in Nashville. She evidently got wind of Jackie Cochran's plan to establish a corps of female pilots and probably heard of a possible Army plan to hire women to ferry airplanes. 

 

One of Tunner's staff officers was a former reservist from Boston named Lt. Col. Robert Love. Before the war, Love and his wife, the former Nancy Harkness, had operated an aviation company in Boston. Nancy Love was an accomplished pilot and she had a background in ferrying airplanes from manufacturers to dealers. After her husband was recalled to active duty, Nancy took a job in Tunner's office. She proposed to her new boss that the Ferrying Service begin employing experienced women pilots to ferry airplanes. Tunner liked the idea and gave Love the green light to recruit a number of experienced women as ferry pilots. The requirements were that they had to have a commercial pilot's license with a 200 HP endorsement, have at least 500 hours flying time and must have cross-country navigational experience. Love sent telegrams to female commercial pilots inviting them to apply. One of those she contacted was Cornelia Fort. She was in her last day of training at Link when she was notified of the opportunity to become a ferry pilot. The telegram instructed her to report to New Castle Airfield near Wilmington, DE if she wanted to apply. 

 

Cornelia Fort took Love up on the offer and rushed to Wilmington, Delaware where the squadron of female pilots would be based as the Women's Airforce Ferrying Service. Although they would be organized into a squadron, the women were civilian contractors just like the male pilots, some of whom would be offered commissions as service pilots and assigned to transport squadrons. The women would not have that option. Still, they would be flying military airplanes, which at the time were primarily Piper light liaison planes and Fairchild trainers. The group of women selected turned out to be largely products of East Coast finishing schools and exclusive colleges. Nancy Love was a Vassar girl. Her deputy, Betty Gillies, had attended Ogontz, as had Cornelia Fort. The training at Ogontz included military drill, which came in handy when the women learned they were going to have to participate in the weekly Saturday morning reviews.  Cornelia Fort was the second woman the Army hired, after Betty Gillies an experienced woman pilot whose husband was an executive with Grumman Aircraft on Long Island. As the women gained experience, they were moved into more complex trainers and, in the case of some of the more experienced, combat airplanes. Betty Gillies was the first woman checked out in fighters. She and Love were also qualified to fly bombers and transports. Cornelia Fort arrived at New Castle Airport even before Love did. She was interviewed and her flying skills were evaluated by an instructor in a PT-19, an open-cockpit low-winged trainer. After a month of training to learn military policy and procedures, she and the other new female recruits were put to work initially ferrying new Piper L-4 Cubs from the Piper factory at Lockhaven, Pennsylvania to Army airfields around the country. The first delivery was to Mitchell Field on Long Island. Betty Gillies led the flight and Cornelia was deputy lead. Cornelia's next delivery was a Piper Cub to the Army facility at Berry Field at her hometown of Nashville. After eight Cub deliveries, she began delivering PT-19s. The women shuttled by bus to Hagerstown, MD to ferry Fairchild PT-19 primary trainers from the Fairchild plant to training bases, mostly in the South and Texas where the Army established training bases due to the better flying weather and mild winters. Her first delivery was to Vernon, Texas. She also delivered one to Dyersburg, Tennessee where the Army had established a training base. She took advantage of her proximity to Nashville and stopped off to visit her family. The WAFS also picked up PT-26s at the Hagerstown plant and delivered them to Canadian bases.

 

About the time the first women, called "The Originals", reported to New Castle, Jackie Cochran's training program got underway. Her program initially was to train less-experienced women to fly military airplanes so they could become civilian ferry pilots. Before it ended, it had been opened up women with no flying experience at all. As more women were hired and in anticipation of women from Cochran's program becoming available in April 1943, new squadrons were set up at various locations where military airplanes were being manufactured. Commanders of the various ferrying squadrons were queried to see if they would accept women, Three responded that they would. A contingent of about half a dozen women were sent to Long Beach, California where Vultee manufactured military trainers. Other women were assigned to squadrons at Romulus, Michigan and Dallas, Texas. 

 

The presence of young, attractive female pilots at their husband's bases did not set well with the wives of the ferry pilots. They saw the potential for problems. Some squadrons established policys that female pilots would not be assigned to groups with male pilots, although that was not the case at Long Beach. Soon after they arrived at Long Beach, the WAFS attended a luncheon for the officers' wives club. The wives were obviously not happy that the women were there. When the base commander announced that the women would not fly as copilots with male pilots, the women applauded, to the disgust of the five WAFS. 

 

In December, Cornelia ferried a PT-19 to Nashville and spent Christmas with her mother. She went back to New Castle the next day. On December 27 she worked the Link simulator. At the end of the day, she received a telegram advising that her family home, Fortland, had caught fire and burned to the ground. All of her diaries and possessions burned with it. By this time she knew she was going to California. She wrote a letter to her mother in which she expressed her hope to be able to stop in Nashville on the way. In the letter she mentioned her transfer and that it was official. She hoped to be able to spend a few days in Nashville. She had a flight to somewhere in the South and stopped off in Atlanta and spent New Year's with her brother, a doctor, as had been their father. (WASP apologists claim that female pilots were more reliable than male pilots because they didn't make stops to visit friends. Cornelia certainly did.) He observed that she seemed to be under a lot of stress and wrote their mother recommending that she should resign from the WAFS. She was no doubt stressed by the fire but she was also having relationship problems. And ferrying open-cockpit PT-19s in the dead of winter was turning out to not be much fun. Even though they were issued heavy flying gear and wore helmets and googles, their faces were exposed to the frigid winds. Her orders came through in mid-February while she was on a trip to Canada delivering a PT-26, which had a canopy. (PT-26s were basically PT-19s with canopies Fairchild produced for the Royal Canadian Air Force.) She managed to stop off for a day in Nashville where she went fox hunting in a snowstorm. She flew out of Nashville the next morning and arrived in the afternoon in time to go to the beach. (WAFS traveled by commercial airlines if available, otherwise they traveled by train or bus.) The next morning she was checked out on the Vultee BT-13 basic trainer, a more powerful and complex airplane than she had been flying, with a variable-pitch propeller, mechanically operated flaps and fixed landing gear. By March 1, she had delivered three BT-13s to airfields in Texas. She complained about carburetor ice over Guadalupe Pass on the way to Midland, which seems to have been their regular fuel stop on the way to Dallas. One of her deliveries was to an airfield at San Antonio. However, after the three trips, she had a lag period due to the factory putting out as many airplanes as possible at the end of the month then taking a week or two to gear back up. She took advantage of the lull visiting friends and going to the beach. She bought a car, a Chevrolet convertible. 

 

The media got wind of the female ferry pilots and they became subjects of a massive propaganda program with a lot of hype. The requirements were strict but Jackie Cochran, who was incensed that Love had been allowed to set up the WAFS, pressured Army Air Forces commander General Henry H. "Hap" Arnold to let her set up a training program to train women with little experience to fly military airplanes. They called themselves WASPS, using the Women's Airforce Service Pilots acronym. However, the human WASPS had no stingers. They were trained to fly military airplanes but were not given combat training and were not considered to be military pilots. Since the WAFS pilots were experienced pilots, they were not put through extensive training but Cochran's program was to train women with less flying experience. Before the program ended, it was opened up to women with no flying experience. The women were glamourized and hyped. More than 25,000 women applied to be trained to fly military airplanes but less than two thousand were accepted and only 1,074 completed the course. Although they are hyped as having been ferry pilots of combat airplanes, only about 300 were ever assigned to fly fighters and most of them were WAFS. WASPS ferried trainers and bombers; some were assigned to tow targets for antiaircraft gunners to practice on. WASPS are touted as being "test pilots" but the testing was the acceptance check for new airplanes coming out of the factory before they were delivered.  For a time, the WAFS continued as part of the Air Transport Command but Arnold decided there wasn't room for two female pilot organizations and transferred the WAFS into the WASPS. Jackie Cochran was given command with Nancy Love heading the WAFS, a move that incensed the WAFS, who were already experienced pilots and had been ferrying airplanes before the WASPS came along. They would continue ferrying airplanes. Although they claim her, Cornelia Fort was never a WASP. By the time the WAFS were rolled into the WASPS, she was dead. Cornelia Fort was the first of 38 female pilots to die while working for the Army.  (She was not the first female pilot to die, but the first WAFS ferry pilot. A WASP trainee had died in a training accident several days before Fort was killed.)

 

The level of Cornelia Fort's skills as a pilot isn't known. All that's really known about her flying is that she worked for a couple of months in Hawaii as a flight instructor followed by a few months more in Nashville before she was hired by the WAFS. At the time of her death, she had logged over 1,100 hours of flying time, more than half of which was as a flight instructor. She had over 800 hours when she joined the WAFS, meaning she logged over 300 hours of ferrying time from October to March, about 50-60 hours a month. (One writer claims she had over 900 hours when she was hired by the Army which reduces her ferrying time by 100 hours.) Ferrying airplanes was merely flying from Point A to Point B with stops in between for refueling and overnight rest, but doesn't involve "stick and rudder" flying except to hold a heading and maintain an altitude. The main requirement was the ability to read a map and navigate, meaning to plot a course using forecast winds to determine heading and ground speed then following that course by referencing planned checkpoints on the map with the ground to keep track of position. They could also navigate using radio beacons on airplanes equipped with radios. The only potential hazards were the possibility of unforecast bad weather and mechanical failure, which was unlikely in the brand-new airplanes they delivered. For some women, flying long cross-country flights was a new experience. Although hyped by former WASPS and feminist historians, it was actually routine flying. In an unpublished document, Fort related how she had once had to land on a deserted stretch of road in Georgia due to running out of fuel while leading a flight of "observation planes", probably Piper L-4 Cubs. She blamed it on unforecast headwinds. On one flight ferrying Piper Cubs, she nosed over on landing at Charlottesville, Virginia and had to have the prop replaced. The accident was blamed on a soggy field. However, none of the other pilots had a problem landing. She had some experience with aerobatics in a WACO she flew for advanced training after she got her private in a Luscomb. (Civil Aviation regulations required a pilot to be endorsed to fly airplanes with more than 200 horsepower for the commercial license without limitations.) The light planes she learned to fly and taught in were certified for some aerobatics, including loops and rolls. She was taught spins and taught her students how to recover from spins as well as stalls. Proficiency in stall recovery was and still is a requirement for new pilots. Unlike the later women who were put through basic military flight training in military trainers, the WAFS were hired on the basis of their civilian experience and went right to work delivering airplanes from the Piper factory to military airfields, including Berry Field at Nashville, for use in initial training of new military pilots and for liaison work. She had attended a Link instrument training course in New York right after she joined the WAFS and had received some instrument instruction in a twin-engine Cessna C-78/AT-17. Whether she was rated to fly multi-engine airplanes is unclear. 

 

After she transferred to Long Beach, she checked out in the Vultee BT-13, a large all-metal (mostly, the tail was wood) low-wing fixed-gear trainer with a 450-horsepower engine. The BT-13 was considered to be a complicated airplane beause it had mechanical flaps and a variable pitch propeller as well as behing high-powered in comparison to primary trainers like the PT-19. Her previous experience had been in lower-powered PT-19s, PT-26s and Piper L-4s. She instructed in an Interstate Cadet, a single-engine trainer much like the Piper Cub, and Taylorcraft in Hawaii. The most powerful airplane she had previously flown was the 225 HP WACO. Unlike the PT-19, the BT-13 had a canopy over the dual cockpit. It was similar in appearance to the North American AT-6, except the BT-13 had fixed landing gear while the AT-6 gear was retractable. The PT-19 was a primary trainer while the BT-13 was used in the next step of Army flight training as a basic trainer. Cadets moved into the BT-13 after soloing in a primary trainer. Most Army cadets trained in the BT-13. After completing basic flight training, they moved into AT-6s for advanced training. The AT-6 was an advanced trainer used to train pilots for combat. Although North American was located in Los Angeles, Cornelia Fort does not seem to have flown any AT-6s.  In letters to her mother, she reported that she was impressed by the power of the much larger engines on the BT-13s. She and the other WAFS at Long Beach ferried new BT-13s from the Vultee factory to airfields in the Southwest, particularly those in Texas, and to Dallas where another WAFS squadron had located. She related in a letter that she had come to know the route from Long Beach to Dallas "by heart." She was on her way to Dallas when she died. It was only her fifth BT-13 trip. Two of those had been to Dallas, one to San Antonio and the fourth was a delivery to another airfield in California. 

 

Cornelia was one of a group of pilots who left Long Beach with new BT-13s. She was the only woman in a group of about nine pilots. There were only five WAFS at Long Beach at the time. The other pilots, at least some of them, seem to have been active-duty military pilots rather than civilian contract pilots employed by the Ferrying Division. Prior to the war, Army pilots served temporarily with the pre-war Ferry Command as a means of gaining experience. Although it's not clear, the Army pilots on the flight were probably recent pilot training graduates who were assigned to ferry airplanes prior to moving into combat training in bomber, transport and fighter squadrons to train for combat. At this point in the war, Air Transport Command was receiving few pilots from Army flight training but was depending on former civilian pilots commissioned a service pilots. Just what happened is unclear. WASP writers, including some former WAFS, claim the men had flown in formation part of the way although they weren't supposed to. They imply that Cornelia flew alone, that she departed Long Beach after the men due to a photography session with the five WAFS pilots. Three women are sitting on the wing of a BT-13 and two are standing. She spent the night in Tucson then departed the next morning for Midland, Texas to refuel before continuing to deliver the airplane to Dallas. Whether the male pilots also RONed at Tucson is not recorded. Written accounts have her running into the men at Midland. Personally, I suspect she was flying with them all along. Much of the WASP lore about the accident seems to have come from Adela Scharr, who was with Cornelia at New Castle but who was based out of Romulus, Michigan at the time of the accident and had no first-hand knowledge of it. Her "knowledge" was all hearsay and speculation. Scharr related in a book she wrote how she had an incident with a young Army pilot "who wanted to play" and speculated that this had been the case with Cornelia. However, her "evidence" was all hearsay and based on a rumor that spread through the WAFS and WASP trainees after Cornelia became the first woman to die while in Army employment. (The first casualty was still in training when she died.)

 

The Fort family would later claim (1980) that they were told the male pilot completed a "barrel roll" and came down and hit Cormelia's airplane. A barrel roll is a rolling maneuver performed around a point along the airplane's path by pulling the airplane up into what would be a Chandelle turn but continuing the maneuver by going inverted and all the way around to return to the original flight path. The military barrel roll is a little different in that the pilot makes a slight turn in the opposite direction from the intended roll and the nose remains on the same path while in a conventional barrel roll the nose will turn 90 degrees in the direction of the turn before returning to the original path. Aileron rolls are also sometimes mistakenly called barrel rolls. If this is true, the question would be why she didn't see him. Barrel rolls result in the airplane finishing up in the same general vicinity as where it began the maneuver. For the airplane to have hit hers upon completion of a barrel roll, it would have had to have been some distance in front of her. There is one version of the accident, which fits the reported damage to her airplane, that during a stop for fuel in Midland, Cornelia and some of the pilots got into a discussion of formation flying. The Army pilots had been trained in formation flying but the women and male civilians had not. According to this account, some of the pilots - including Cornelia, who seems to have been very enthusiastic about it - decided to fly formation on the next leg on to Dallas. Lt. Frank Stamme reported Cornelia's airplane was to his right and he saw that it was drifting rapidly toward him. Realizing the other BT-13 was going to hit his, Stamme pulled up to avoid a collision but the left wing on Cornelia's BT-13  hit his right landing gear and part of her wing broke off, sending the airplane into a spin or spiral from which she never recovered. Although this article differs from other accounts of Cornelia's life, it is highly possible that this is the true account of the accident, possibly from the accident report. The wingtip and six feet of Cornelia's airplane were reportedly knocked off, which would be consistent with an impact of the front of her wing with Stamme's right gear FROM BEHIND!

 

It appears that the accident definitely occurred while Cornelia was flying close to another BT-13 piloted by Lt. Frank Stamme. According to one of the pilots in the group who was interviewed in the 1990s, several ferry pilots were at Midland at the same time for fuel. While eating lunch in the cafeteria, they got into a discussion about formation flying. Just what Cornelia had to say is not known, but considering her personality, it is likely she wanted to try it. Some writers, perhaps hopefully, conclude that she was reluctant and the Army pilots pressed her into it, alleging that they told her they would take turns flying on her wing. At the beginning of her time with the WAFS, Nancy Love had told the women to stay at least 500 feet apart and not to try to fly close formation. Supposedly, an investigative officer concluded that Stamme had performed a barrel roll and hit her airplane's wing when he came out of it. This may be based on what someone told the family. No one seems to have bothered to obtain a copy of the accident report. The pilot who witnessed the accident merely said that he noticed two BT-13s flying too close together. He did not mention the male pilot doing any kind of roll. Then one suddenly broke off to the right and began to roll. It continued rolling until it went into a nearly vertical dive into the ground. This pilot was some distance away from the others, who had been flying in a loose formation. He claimed the group had worked out a plan where she would fly straight and level and the other pilots would fly on her wing. There were six planes in the formation including Cornelia. The witnessing pilot was some distance away. Another pilot had departed Midland on his own and took off ahead of the others. The investigative officer talked to the pilot in charge of the group and was told that immediately after the collision, Cornelia's airplane rolled over several times then went into an inverted dive while rolling slowly until it impacted the ground. There was speculation that her canopy was jammed by the impact and she was unable to open it to bail out.

 

Writers/historians make much of the fact that Lt. Stamme "only" had 267 hours while Cornelia had over 1,100. However, her time was mostly logged as a flight instructor. As a CFII, ASMEL with over 1,000 hours as an instructor, I assure you that instructor time consists primarily of sitting in the airplane watching someone else fly while doing little hands-on flying yourself. The role of the instructor is to demonstrate a maneuver to the student, who then repeats it until they become proficient. The instructor observes and critiques but is not on the controls themselves. As for military pilots, they were highly trained in high-performance complicated airplanes. Cornelia's training was in a Luscombe light plane with some training in a WACO for her commercial. Her instruction had been in Cubs, Cadets and Taylorcraft with some in WACOs.  She had logged over 800 hours (or over 900) when she was hired by the Army which meant she'd logged about 300 hours (or 200) ferrying airplanes, which consists of flying straight and level. Army pilots, on the other hand, had been given extensive training in complex airplanes, including BT-13s in the basic phase, and were trained to proficiency in aerobatics and formation flying and, depending on where they were in the training pipeline, in combat tactics. The Army trainng program called for 140 hours prior to graduation, with advanced training in AT-6s. With 267 hours, Frank Stamme had 120 hours since graduation, most likely mostly logged in complex airplanes while Cornelia Fort's high-performance experience was limited to whatever she'd logged since she reported to Long Beach. She had only been at Long Beach barely a month when she was killed. She probably had about 25 hours in the BT-13 when she died.  

 

There is a possible factor in the accident. Cornelia had been experiencing some emotional problems so severe that her brother wrote their mother expressing his belief that his sister was worn out and should resign from the WAFS. Whether Nancy Love, Betty Gilles or any of the other WAFS noticed it is not recorded. The loss of her childhood home was shocking. Her emotional state was also affected by a problem with a man. While in Hawaii, she had become close to a young Naval officer who shared some of her interests. He had fallen madly in love with her while her feelings toward him were not reciprocal. They had remained in touch and she had visited his family. Whether she had seen him again after leaving Hawaii is not clear. He gave her a gold bracelet for Christmas and asked her to marry him. She told her mother, who insisted she return the bracelet and let him know she was not interested in marrying him. She sent the bracelet back but did not hear back from him. She was bothered by the experience. She had also been ill due to sickness caused by flying in open-cockpit PT-19s in the dead of winter. These are all factors that would have been considered in a modern aviation accident. 

 

It's doubtful that the investigation of the accident was more than perfunctory. The Army was losing airplanes to accidents almost on a daily basis and many of them involved trainers. There were around fifty accidents on March 21 alone, the day Cornelia Fort died. BT-13s were particularly prone to accidents because of their propensity to spin at low altitudes. More than 90,000 accidents were investigated by the Army Air Forces from 1941-45. The WAFS were part of the Air Transport Command which was probably responsible for the investigation. There's a possibility that ATC influenced the investigation out of fear that a finding placing Cornelia at fault would jeopardize the WAFS program. ATC commander General Harold George knew Cornelia personally and she was personal friends with the Long Beach squadron commander and his wife. Army Air Forces records were routinely classified for a period of thirty years. The file on Cornelia Fort's death was not declassified until 1973. Whether any of the WAFS saw it is unclear. Nancy Love had no idea what had happened when she attended Cornelia Fort's funeral. Although Army Air Forces accident investigation reports are available through the Air Force Historical Office, it doesn't appear that those writing about the WAFS/WASPS and about Cornelia Fort have bothered to go through the process of obtaining a copy. 

 

Former WASPS and WAFS when writing about Cornelia Fort usually repeat Adela Sharr's speculation that the accident was caused by an Army pilot somehow playing with Cornelia, "showing out". West Tennessee native Doris Brinker Tanner, who was a WASP pilot, in her otherwise excellent pamphlet about Cornelia's life, repeats Sharr's claims. Other writers often do likewise. (Although I worked at the Union City, Tennessee airport near where Mrs. Tanner lived, I don't recall ever meeting her or even knowing a former WASP pilot lived in the area. At the time I was there, she was a professor at the University of Tennessee Martin Branch, where many of the flight students in our flying school were enrolled in ROTC. I do not recall my employer, who had worked at the Union City airport as a mechanic during the war and ran the airport for decades afterward, mentioning her.)  

 

Regardless of how it happened, the two airplanes somehow came into contact. Those writing about her claim the other pilot "hit" her airplane, but this doesn't make sense. According to reports, the tip of her wing and some six feet of the leading edge were knocked off, which would indicate that her wing contacted the other airplane's landing gear FROM BEHIND, which would indicate that she was below and behind him. WASP writers indicate that Cornelia PULLED UP which would have caused her wing to strike the other airplane. The other account states that Stamme pulled up to avoid her which explains why her wing hit his landing gear. I have not seen the actual accident report, but the Army wrote it off as a temporary mental failure, which would indicate a belief that she panicked. No blame was assigned to either pilot. (WASP writers theorize that Stamme caused the accident but was not "court-martialed" due to the pressing need for Army pilots, but this is theory, not fact.) After the two airplanes came into contact, Cornelia's airplane went into a "dive" straight into the ground. The other pilot survived. Some accounts claim he parachuted to safety but others state that he landed the airplane. The reported damage to her airplane as a missing wing tip and a portion of the wing leading edge should not have been enough to cause her to lose control of the airplane - unless the airplane went into a spin and she was unable to recover. Why she would have gone into a dive is unclear since the reported damage to her airplane is hardly major. Wingtips and leading edges are additions to airfoils to give them a more streamlined appearance. However, the sudden loss of the leading edge could have caused the left wing to stall and drop, with the airplane going into a spin or a spiral. The accounts of the pilots who saw the airplane going down indicate that it was in a spiral.  

 

A spin occurs when one wing stalls before the other. In practice, pilots put their airplane into a spin by putting it into an intentional stall while kicking rudder in the direction they want the airplane to spin. Unintentional spins occur when the airplane suddently stalls, such as with an accelerated stall, a stall that occurs well above published stall speed. Accelerated stalls usually occur when the airplane is banked and often result in a spin due to one wing stalling prior to the other. Even intentional spins require from a few hundred to thousands of feet to get out of. Spirals are also diving turns but the difference is that the wings are not stalled. If the pilot pulls back on the controls, the spiral will tighten and airspeed will increase. With part of Cornelia's left wing gone, her airplane may have rolled into a spin or steep spiral out of control. The airplane reportedly went into the ground in an inverted nose-first dive, which is consistent with a spin or spiral. That her airplane was reported as "rolling" may indicate a spiral. The accident was witnessed by the landowners on which the BT-13 fell to the earth. They quickly realized the young woman - she had just turned 24 - was dead and notified Army authorities at the nearby Abilene Army Air Base. The other pilots reportedly left the area once they realized people were at the crash site and continued to Dallas. Her remains were shipped to Nashville by train and she was buried in the family plot at Mount Olivet Cemetery. Nancy Love and the WAFS commander at Long Beach along the commander of the ferry detachment flew to Nashville for the funeral. When the family asked what happened, they told them they didn't know. They didn't. The accident was still under investigation.

 

Cornelia's death was widely reported because of her notoriety as a "hero" of Pearl Harbor and that she was the first American woman pilot to die while in Army employ. (WASP writers downplay that her military status was that of a civilian employee just like the male contract ferry pilots and imply that she was in the Army.) She was the first WAFS pilot to be killed but was the second woman to die while in Army employ. Although WASPs quickly claimed her, she was never a WASP. The WAFS weren't rolled into the WASP until six months after her death. 

 

After the war, Ernest Colbert and Bill Miller bought property in a bend of the Cumberland River near the Fort home and built an airport. They named it Cornelia Fort Airpark in honor of Cornelia, who had grown up nearby. They formed a company named Colmill Enterprises, which became famous for aircraft modification work, particularly the Piper Navajo. Their airport became a popular base for airplanes belonging to members of the country music world. Popular singer Patsy Cline was on her way to Cornelia Fort Airpark when her airplane crashed just west of the Tennessee River in 1963. The airpark was covered by water in the 2010 Tennessee Flood when the Cumberland River got out of its banks and covered the airpark. As a result of the damage, Colbert, who had bought out Miller, was forced to sell the property to the city, which included it in the Shelby Park/Shelby Bottoms/Cornelia Fort park. 

 

Women Pilots in the AAF Historical Study

 

WWomen Pilots in WW II