“I knew I was going to join the WAFS before the organization was a reality, before it had a name, before it was anything but a radical idea in the minds of a few men who believed that women could fly airplanes. But I never knew it so surely as I did in Honolulu on Dec. 7, 1941.” Cornelia Fort

Lettice Curtis was the first of twelve women chosen to attain Class 5. As such, she is the first woman to fly a bomber. She flew the Avro Lancaster bomber. Asked why she didn't press to fly in battle: “There was no question of it, and it was not a question you asked. It just never came up.”

"I might have been born in a hovel, but I determined to travel with the wind and the stars." Jacqueline Cochran set more flying records than any other woman in the history of aviation.

In 1939 Jacqueline Cochran wrote to Eleanor Roosevelt to promote the idea of women pilots taking over non-combat military flying so that men would be freed to fly into combat. In 1945, Jacqueline Cochran was the first woman to be awarded the Distinguished Service Medal.

Military test pilot, French Resistance fighter, survivor of a disfiguring airplane crash and the subsequent operations, repeatedly recognized as one of the fastest flyers in the world -- Jacqueline Marie-Thérèse Suzanne Douet Auriol laid the ground-work for women military veterans to proudly follow.