You may not have heard of the late aviatix and all around daredevil Betty Skelton, but after reading this article about her life, you might kind of want to be her.
Skelton died of cancer on August 31 at age 85, but it’s her life, not her death, that’s noteworthy. To put it succinctly: she was a complete and utter badass, a pioneer daredevil who drove airplanes and cars in ways many men dared not.
The LA times reports,
Born June 28, 1926, the year before Charles Lindbergh made his historic transatlantic flight, Skelton grew up watching Navy pilots perform stunts in the skies above her Pensacola, Fla., home. While other girls were playing with dolls, she collected model airplanes and talked her parents into paying for flying lessons when she was 10.
At 12 she made her first unofficial solo flight. “I didn’t tell my mother for about a week,” she recalled in a NASA oral history interview in 1999.
She soloed officially at 16, when she earned her pilot’s license.
She was too young to fight in World War II and too female to become a commercial pilot, and thus turned to stunt flying. She purchased a red and white stunt plane she nicknamed “Little Stinker” and eventually donated it to the Smithsonian Institution.
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