Aviation Pioneers: Amelia Earhart and Bessie Coleman's Record-Breaking Flights

Women Who Travel | Condé Nast Traveler

Condé Nast Traveler

Society & Culture, Places & Travel

4.4 • 636 Ratings

🗓️ 28 March 2024

⏱️ 31 minutes

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Summary

As Women's History Month comes to a close, we dive into the stories of two pioneering pilots: Amelia Earhart and Bessie Coleman. Yet while the legend of Earhart’s aviation feats and mysterious disappearance has long gripped the public imagination, Coleman’s equally impressive career as the first African-American woman to hold a pilot license is a story that still largely goes untold. Lale chats with Dorothy Cochrane, a curator at the National Air and Space Museum in Washington, to find out more about both pilots record-breaking flights, the risks they took, the individual challenges they faced, and the ingenious ways they advocated for themselves.

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Transcript

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0:00.0	Hi there, I'm Lale Arakoglu, and this is women who travel.
0:08.8	After exploring the depths of the ocean recently, we thought this would be a good opportunity
0:12.8	to take to the skies in honour of Women's History Month and discover more about Amelia Earhart and
0:18.0	Bessie Coleman.
0:20.4	Amelia, of course, is known for her record-breaking flights.
0:23.9	Brave Bessie is known for her daring, barnstorming stunts.
0:27.8	Both were good publicists, self-promoters,
0:30.4	and had ingenious schemes to fund their own flights.
0:43.1	It's a matter of keeping these women in the limelight,
0:49.7	acknowledging who they were as pioneers, as pioneering women who were resilient,
0:53.7	they had visions, they saw no limits for themselves.
1:01.2	As a pilot and as a curator and as someone who's working in the aviation space,
1:04.9	what do these two women mean to you? How do you see them?
1:14.2	They're such strong women who really made their own way in the world against all these odds, especially Bessie.
1:19.7	I'm talking to Dorothy Cochran, a curator at the National Air and Space Museum in Washington.
1:26.7	You know, the average woman at that time, whether black or white, was tied to the family.
1:30.1	They wanted to do something different. Once they both found aviation, it's what they wanted to do. So I think you look at them as always looking at
1:38.1	life differently, wanting a different life for themselves, and then being able to persevere and make it happen
1:45.3	in the 1920s. I'd love to hear a little bit about you first, because you come from an aviation
1:52.4	background yourself. You're a curator, but you're also a pilot. When I first came to the museum,
2:00.1	I did not have an aviation background.
2:03.1	And so one of the things I did was decide to get my pilot license so that I would understand and basically have a future here.
	...

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