People · Betty Skelton · Chapter 1 of 9

A Pensacola Sky

Pensacola, Florida — the late 1920s and 1930s

Betty Skelton is born June 28, 1926, in a city built around the sound of aircraft engines. Pensacola is home to a Naval Air Station that has trained American military pilots since 1914, and the planes overhead are simply part of the local weather. Most children who grow up under that flight path learn to tune it out. Betty does the opposite. As a toddler, she is drawn to every airplane that crosses the sky above her house, and she wants nothing to do with dolls — model airplanes are the only toys that hold her attention for long. By age eight she has moved on to reading actual aviation books, and her parents realize this isn't a phase a girl is supposed to grow out of. It's simply who their daughter is.

What happens next says as much about the Skelton family as it does about Betty herself. Instead of managing the obsession, they join it: the whole family begins taking flying lessons together. For most households this might have stayed a shared hobby. For Betty it becomes the opening chapter of a career that will eventually span airplanes, race cars, speedboats, and — improbably — a battery of tests designed for America's first astronauts.

She soloed an airplane at twelve. The legal minimum age was sixteen. Nobody seems to have told her to wait.

The precise mechanics of how a twelve-year-old comes to solo an aircraft four years before the law allows it are lost to time — instructors and small airfields in the 1930s operated with a great deal more informality than aviation does today, and a talented, fearless kid with a supportive family and a local flight instructor willing to look the other way was, evidently, enough. It is the first of what will eventually be counted as seventeen aviation and automobile records and firsts across her life, and it sets a pattern she never breaks: wait for permission only as long as legally required, and not a moment longer.

On her sixteenth birthday — the earliest date the law will allow it — Betty Skelton collects her pilot's license. The timing could not have been worse, or better, depending on how you look at it. The world is at war, and the sky over America is about to become the most contested career field a teenage girl could possibly choose.