Radiotopia.

From PRX.

From PRX's Radiotopia.

This is Radio Diaries.

I'm Joe Richmond.

Oh, say, let us fly girls where dear, to the tiger.

Today, fly girls.

The history of women in flight has a lot of firsts.

There's Amelia Earhart, the first woman to fly solo across the Atlantic.

Around the same time that Earhart was learning to fly, in 1921,

Bessie Coleman became the first African-American female pilot in the world.

She got her pilots license in France because no American flying

school would accept a black woman. And in 1993, after Congress lifted the ban against

women flying in combat, Jeannie Levitt became America's first female fighter pilot. She

flew a total of 300 combat hours over Iraq and Afghanistan. But women actually

started flying military aircraft much earlier

during World War II. At the time, thousands of new airplanes were coming off assembly lines

and needed to be delivered to military bases around the country. But most of America's pilots

were overseas fighting the war. So the Air Force launched an experimental program to train hundreds of female

pilots.

They were called the Women Air Force Service pilots, the Wasps.

Passing my seatbelt, the throttle is set, fuel pressure is fine.

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