Daredevil pilot Betty Skelton dies at 85
Betty Skelton, a daredevil pilot who was a three-time national aerobatics champion and became known as the "fastest woman on Earth" when she set speed records in airplanes and automobiles, died Aug. 31 at her home in The Villages, Fla. She was 85.
She had cancer, said Dorothy Cochrane, a friend and the curator of general aviation at the Smithsonian's National Air and Space Museum.
Skelton, a 5-foot-2 spitfire, made her first solo flight -- illegally -- at age 12. She went on to become a pioneering and charismatic pilot in the days of propellers and open cockpits.
She gave her first aerobatics performance at 19, appearing in the same show in Jacksonville, Fla., in which the Navy's precision flight team, the Blue Angels, debuted in 1946.
In her brightly painted Pitts Special biplane, the Little Stinker, Skelton performed awe-inspiring feats of airborne daring. She was the first woman to attempt the "inverted ribbon cut," in which she would fly upside down only 10 feet off the ground, slicing a ribbon with her propeller.
The first time Skelton attempted the stunt, Cochrane said, her engine died. She calmly righted her plane and landed on the wheels, then started it up and went back into the air.
"She enjoyed challenges, she enjoyed speed, she enjoyed technology," Cochrane said.
From 1949 through 1951, when she retired from competitive flying, Skelton was the international women's aerobatics champion.
When she wasn't astonishing crowds at air shows, Skelton pursued the outer limits of what planes, and pilots, could accomplish. She twice set light-plane altitude records, reaching a maximum height of 29,050 feet in a Piper Cub in 1951, higher than Mount Everest.
At that altitude, the temperature outside her airplane was 53 degrees below zero.
"I usually fly barefooted," Skelton said in 1999 interview for a NASA oral history project, "and my feet darn near froze to death."
Skelton broke so many barriers in the air and on land that she became known as the "first lady of firsts."
In 1954, she became the first woman to be a test driver for the auto industry. She was the first female boat jumper in the United States, memorably flying a boat over a Dodge sedan in a publicity stunt in 1955.
She was the first woman to drive an Indy car, and in the 1950s, repeatedly set records for speed and acceleration at racetracks.
In 1956, Skelton broke a transcontinental speed record, driving from New York to Los Angeles, covering 2,913 miles in 56 hours, 58 minutes. Two years later, she crossed South America from Buenos Aires to Valparaiso, Chile, in 41 hours, 14 minutes.
When NASA was training the first cadre of astronauts in 1959, Look magazine asked Skelton to undergo the same rigorous physical and psychological training. She passed every test and won the respect of the Mercury Seven astronauts, who nicknamed her "7 1/2."
She set her final major land-speed record in 1965, when she topped 315 mph on the Bonne-ville Salt Flats of Utah.
Her husband, Allan Erde, is her sole survivor.
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