People · Profile No. 4

Betty Skelton

She soloed an airplane at twelve, four years before it was legal. She won three straight world aerobatic championships and then walked away at the top. She talked her way into the auto industry when no woman had ever test-driven a car for a living, and in February 1956 she strapped into a Corvette prepared by Zora Arkus-Duntov himself and proved, in one flying mile of Daytona sand, that Chevrolet's pretty little roadster could actually move. The Mercury astronauts would later call her "eight."

The chapters

• Prologue Daytona Beach, 1956 A former air-show champion straps into a car for the first time in her professional life — and Zora Arkus-Duntov is the one who prepped it.
• Chapter 1 A Pensacola Sky A toddler who preferred airplanes to dolls solos at twelve — four years before it's legal.
• Chapter 2 Wings in Wartime Too young for the WASP, too determined to wait — how a teenager became a licensed pilot while the world was still at war.
• Chapter 3 First Lady of Aerobatics Three straight world championships, a biplane named Little Stinker, and a stunt that involved flying upside down ten feet off the ground.
• Chapter 4 Retiring at the Top She walks away from air shows for good — and talks Chrysler into letting a woman test-drive cars for the first time in industry history.
• Chapter 5 The Fastest Woman on Wheels Chevrolet hires her. Zora Arkus-Duntov and Smokey Yunick prep her Corvette. The sand at Daytona does the rest.
• Chapter 6 The Gold Corvette Harley Earl and Bill Mitchell's studio builds her a one-off translucent gold Corvette — and she drives it to lead the 1957 Daytona field.
• Chapter 7 Records Without End Transcontinental runs, 24-hour endurance records, and a 316-mph pass at Bonneville in a jet-powered dragster.
• Chapter 8 The Girl Astronaut A magazine stunt puts her through the exact same tests as the Mercury Seven. The astronauts start calling her "eight."
• Chapter 9 Legacy A red Corvette convertible in a Florida retirement community, a biplane in the Smithsonian, and a trophy that still bears her name.

Further reading

See the Smithsonian National Air and Space Museum's profile, the National Corvette Museum's tribute, and GM's own retrospective on her Chevrolet years.

Her Corvette years are inseparable from three other lives: Zora Arkus-Duntov, who personally prepared her 1956 Daytona car; and Harley Earl and Bill Mitchell, whose styling studio built the one-off gold Corvette she drove in 1957.