Betty Skelton, 1926–2011

last updated 8 January 2015

In the late 1940s, champion flier Betty Skelton decided to add a new stunt to her roster of aerobatic tricks. The “inverted ribbon cut” required Skelton to fly her biplane, Little Stinker, upside down only 10 feet off the ground and slice a ribbon with her propeller. During her first attempt, she misjudged the ribbon’s height and flew underneath it, putting her even closer to the ground. “Then, less than two seconds later and without any warning, the engine stopped dead,” said Skelton. But she didn’t panic. Skelton calmly righted the plane and landed it. She immediately flew at the ribbon again, entering the record books as the first woman to accomplish the daredevil feat.

Skelton caught the aviation bug early. Growing up in Pensacola, Fla., she’d watch airplanes soar over a nearby naval airfield, and at the age of 8 began writing to plane manufacturers asking for brochures. “An only child, she persuaded her parents to take flying lessons with her,” said The Wall Street Journal, “and soon the family was operating a flight school in Tampa.” Skelton had a private license at 16—although she’d completed her first solo flight at 12—and was a flight instructor at 18. As military and commercial aviation were closed to women, she turned to showmanship, wowing crowds with her displays of aeronautical daring.

When she wasn’t flying at air shows, “Skelton pursued the outer limits of what airplanes—and pilots—could accomplish,” said The Washington Post. She set two light-airplane altitude records, and in 1949 almost beat the women’s airspeed record, in a P-51 Mustang. Unfortunately, her engine exploded in midair, but again, she gently brought the bird back to earth. In 1950, having achieved by age 24 everything possible for a woman flier, Skelton turned to auto racing. She was the first woman to drive an Indy car, and repeatedly set records for speed and acceleration at racetracks, beaches, and salt flats across the U.S.