Cornelia Fort

Cornelia Fort

      A wiki link on this individual can be found at:  http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cornelia_Fort

            Another link about her and her airplane during the Pearl Harbor Japanese air attack can be found at:  http://www.airspacemag.com/history-of-flight/A-Pearl-Harbor-Mystery.html

            Here's a short story about her, too:

Fort flew for her country

By Old Uncle Gib  Chronicle correspondent The Crossville Chronicle

CROSSVILLE — Cornelia Clark Fort was born in Nashville on Feb. 5, 1919, to Rufus Elijah Fort and Louise Clark Fort. Cornelia had three older brothers and one younger sister. In 1900, Dr. Rufus Fort was already a physician in Nashville. He went on to be co-founder, vice president and medical director of the National Life and Accident Insurance Company. Cornelia graduated from Sarah Lawrence College, and did all the things a young debutante in Nashville would do when she returned from college.

Dr. Fort felt that flying was dangerous and he made his sons swear that they would never become pilots. He forgot to include Cornelia in this oath, and she became interested in flying, making her first solo flight in April 1940, and becoming a civilian instructor pilot in Hawaii.

On December 7, 1941, while Cornelia was teaching takeoffs and landings to a student pilot, they became eye witnesses to the first wave of attacks on the ships in Pearl Harbor. At the time they were flying in an Interstate Cadet monoplane two-seat light aircraft produced in El Segundo, California. This training flight and a few other civilian aircraft were the only U.S. airplanes in the air near Pearl Harbor on this morning. A short segment in the movie, “Tora! Tora! Tora!” portrayed their flight.

Cornelia saw an airplane flying directly toward their plane and grabbed the controls to avert a collision. When she looked around she saw the “Rising Sun” on the side of the airplane they had just avoided hitting and realized it was a Japanese plane. She then saw black smoke coming from Pearl Harbor and swarms of Japanese airplanes flying into the harbor.

As quickly as possible she landed her plane at the civilian airport near the mouth of Pearl Harbor. She and her student ran for cover as the Japanese plane strafed her airplane and the runway. The airport manager was killed in this attack and two other civilian airplanes that had been in the sky that morning never returned.

In September 1942, Cornelia Fort was one of the first five women to volunteer for service in the Women's Auxiliary Ferrying Squadron (WAFS). March 21, 1943, while flying on a ferrying mission from San Diego to Texas, her plane was struck by another plane near Abilene, Texas, and Cornelia Fort was killed in the crash. Shortly before her death she wrote, “I am grateful that my one talent, flying, was useful to my country.” She is buried in Mount Olivet Cemetery in Nashville. Her foot marker says, “Killed in the service of her country.”

In 1945, the Cornelia Fort Airport was constructed near the Fortland family farm in East Nashville. In 1977, the U.S. Congress declared that members of the WAFS and its outgrowth, the WASPs, were active members of the military officially making Cornelia Fort the first American woman pilot to die on active military duty.

- See more at: http://www.crossville-chronicle.com/local/x439241867/Fort-flew-for-her-country/?state=taberU#sthash.ArUiReaU.dpuf