The Women of the Skies: The Female Pilots the History Books Left Behind
This week on the Adventure Story Podcast, I'm chasing the stories of the women who took to the skies when the whole world expected them to stay firmly on the ground. They flew faster, higher, and further than anyone thought possible — and far too many of them were quietly written out of the history books. It's long past time we put them back in.
Who you'll meet in this episode:
- Marina Raskova & the Night Witches — the record-setting aviator who somehow convinced Stalin to let women fly into combat, and the wooden biplanes that whispered like a broomstick before the bombs hit.
- Bessie Coleman — turned away by every flight school in America for being Black and a woman, so she learned French, sailed to Europe, and came home as "Queen Bess," refusing to fly a single segregated show.
- Jacqueline Cochran — sold cosmetics by day and broke the sound barrier by weekend, ending up with more speed, distance, and altitude records than any pilot in history. Man or woman.
- Hanna Reitsch — the test pilot they called when nobody else dared, first woman to fly a helicopter, a rocket plane, a jet fighter… and a story we can't tell honestly without the uncomfortable parts.
- Jerrie Mock — first woman to fly solo around the world, with a Cessna, a map, and frankly no intention of making history at all.
- Amelia Earhart — the name everyone knows, with a story far stranger and richer than the legend.
- Beryl Markham — if Earhart is the name everyone knows, Markham is the one everyone should. Raised barefoot in colonial Kenya, first to fly the Atlantic solo east-to-west, against the wind the whole way.
Different countries, different eras, different fights. What they shared was a refusal — quiet or ferocious — to accept that the sky belonged to anyone but them.
Loved these stories? So did I — so much that I built a whole series around them.
Co-written with John Hopton, the Nora "Sierra" Byrd Airborne Adventures follow a retired Air Force pilot who wants nothing more than to be left alone with her beloved Dakota C-47 and her little flight school in the Caribbean. The world, naturally, has other plans.
Her first adventure is Shadow of the Sunstone — a miracle plant, a coded sunstone, and the future of humanity riding on one pilot who just wanted some peace and quiet. From ancient tombs to high-stakes dogfights, it's an explosive archaeological thriller. 👉 Check it out here.
Takeaways:
- The Night Witches, a group of female pilots, executed over 20,000 missions during World War II.
- Marina Raskova was instrumental in establishing all-female air regiments during the war, overcoming significant challenges.
- Bessie Coleman became the first African American woman to earn a pilot's license, defying racial barriers.
- Jacqueline Cochrane set numerous aviation records, including being the first woman to break the sound barrier.
- Hannah Reitsch, despite her controversial affiliations, achieved significant milestones in aviation history.
- Geri Mock's solo flight around the world in 1964 exemplified determination and remarkable skill in aviation.
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Transcript
The engine cuts out.
Speaker A:There's silence.
Speaker A:Nothing but the wind, the creak of the airframe, the distant thrum of the searchlight sweeping the sky below.
Speaker A:In the cockpit of a Soviet biplane, somewhere over Nazi occupied territory, a young woman holds her breath.
Speaker A:She's cut the engine deliberately, gliding in low and silent, invisible in the darkness, invisible to the guns that would tear her apart if they found her.
Speaker A:The Germans have learned to listen for the sound of these planes, so she's stopped making sound altogether.
Speaker A:They have a name for her, for all the women who fly like this night after night, dropping their payload and vanishing before the searchlights can catch them.
Speaker A:They call them the Night Witches.
Speaker A:And even hardened soldiers, men who have seen the worst of the Eastern front, admit that the Night Witches are terrifying.
Speaker A:She releases the bombs, kicks the engine back to life, banks hard and disappears into the dark.
Speaker A:She is barely 20 years old and will fly over a thousand missions before the war is done.
Speaker A:And history will barely remember her name.
Speaker A:Hey, I'm Luke.
Speaker A:I'm an author of archaeological adventure novels.
Speaker A:I travel the world looking for stories to put into my books and to share with you right here on the Adventure Story podcast.
Speaker A:Right, just before we get started, before we dive in.
Speaker A:Most podcasts grow through recommendations, so please share this with any adventure lovers in your life.
Speaker A:Right, let's get started.
Speaker A:Today we're talking about the women who took to the skies when the world expected them to stay on the ground.
Speaker A:These are women who flew faster, who flew higher and further than anyone else, and who in many cases are missing from the history books.
Speaker A:These are the women of the skies, and I think it's long past time that we told their story.
Speaker A:Let's start with a woman who was not only a world class aviator, but she convinced Stalin to let her fly.
Speaker A:Marina Raskova wasn't the woman in the cockpit I was describing.
Speaker A:But without her, that woman may never have been there at all.
Speaker A:Raskova was the driving force behind the Night Witches.
Speaker A:And without her, those wooden biplanes never would have left the ground.
Speaker A:The Soviet Union's first female navigator, she was a record setting aviator.
Speaker A: In: Speaker A:She convinced Stalin, not a man famous for taking other people's ideas on board, to allow women to fly in combat.
Speaker A:The result was three all female air regiments, the most famous of which was the 588th Night Bomber Regiment, later renamed the 46th Guard Night Bomber Aviation Regiment, also known as the Night Witches.
Speaker A:Flying wooden biplanes left over from the previous decade, they operated exclusively at night, often flying without parachutes, without radar or radio.
Speaker A:They went into combat in these fragile planes that were slow and exposed to and terrifyingly vulnerable.
Speaker A:They flew in pairs, one pilot, one navigator, carrying only what the small aircraft could hold.
Speaker A:And to avoid detection, they switched off their engines on the final approach and glided silently over enemy camps, and then dropped their bombs and disappeared back into the dark before the searchlights could find them.
Speaker A:The only sound those below heard just before the attack was a soft whooshing, like the sweep of a witch's broomstick, hence the name.
Speaker A:They flew over 20,000 missions over the course of the war and dropped thousands of explosives.
Speaker A:Many of them were named heroes of the Soviet Union, the country's highest military order.
Speaker A: Raskova herself died in: Speaker A:She was the first woman in the Soviet Union to be given a state funeral, and her squadrons fought on without her until the very end of the war.
Speaker A:The Night Witches changed the course of the war.
Speaker A:But two decades earlier, a young woman from Texas was fighting a very different kind of battle entirely, One that didn't involve bombs or searchlights, just a country that had decided, before she'd even tried that the sky wasn't for her.
Speaker A:Bessie Coleman didn't just break the rules, she flew straight over them.
Speaker A: Born in: Speaker A:So she did what no one expected.
Speaker A:She learned to speak French, sailed to Europe and earned her pilot's license in France.
Speaker A: In: Speaker A:And that's when the show began.
Speaker A:Queen Bess, as the crowds came to call her, wowed audiences across the country with loop the loops and figure eight dives.
Speaker A:She became one of the most recognised aviators of her era.
Speaker A:But she wasn't just a performer.
Speaker A:She refused to fly at segregated events.
Speaker A:If black spectators couldn't watch from the same area as the white ones, she simply didn't fly.
Speaker A:And she had a bigger dream, too to open a flight school for African Americans.
Speaker A:Unfortunately, that never happened.
Speaker A: In: Speaker A:She was just 34 years old.
Speaker A:Her legacy, though, continues to this day.
Speaker A:Jacqueline Cochrane sold cosmetics by day, but at weekends, she broke Records Cochrane came from nothing.
Speaker A:Abandoned as a child, raised in poverty in rural Florida, working in cotton mills and beauty salons before she ever set foot in the cockpit.
Speaker A: She learned to fly in the: Speaker A:By the time she was done, though, Cochrane held more speed, distance and altitude records than any pilot in history, man or woman.
Speaker A:She was the first woman to break the sound barrier, the first to pilot a bomber across the Atlantic, the first to fly a jet across an ocean.
Speaker A:During the Second World War, she helped build and lead the WASP program, the women Air Force service pilots whose more than 1,000 female pilots ferried military aircraft testing planes and handled essential flying duties so the male pilots could be freed for the combat roles.
Speaker A:She made one of the first blind instrument landings ever recorded, too.
Speaker A:And she competed in and won some of the most gruelling air races of her era.
Speaker A: By the time she died in the: Speaker A:Now, let's talk about Hannah Reicht.
Speaker A:She wasn't just a pilot.
Speaker A:She was the person they called when they needed someone to fly something no one had ever flown before.
Speaker A: In the late: Speaker A:She went on to become the first woman to fly a rocket powered aircraft and later a jet fighter.
Speaker A:She tested prototypes, experimental designs, one offs and machines that barely anyone understood.
Speaker A:Yet she set over 40 records in altitude and endurance in both powered aircraft and gliders.
Speaker A:Her story's a complicated one, though.
Speaker A:Reitsch flew for Nazi Germany and with conviction.
Speaker A:She met Hitler and remained loyal to the regime long after the war had ended.
Speaker A:Although that's part of her story and it doesn't erase what she did in the air.
Speaker A:It means we can't tell her story without it.
Speaker A:History, after all, isn't always comfortable.
Speaker A:And then there's Geri Mock, who wasn't out to make history at all.
Speaker A: In: Speaker A:She had no modern support crew, no satellite navigation and no global media circus.
Speaker A:Just a small aircraft, careful planning and a forbiddable amount of nerve.
Speaker A:And more than 20,000 miles of ocean crossings, radio failures, iced over wings, and that particular brand of stubbornness that tends to make history.
Speaker A:She made it.
Speaker A:The journey took 29 days and 21 stops.
Speaker A:She navigated with radio beacons and a sextant, flying for hours at a time over open ocean with nothing but her instruments and her instincts.
Speaker A:By the end, she had set seven world records.
Speaker A:Then there's one name when you mention women in aviation that everyone knows.
Speaker A:And yet the story behind the name is richer, stranger and more complicated than the legend suggests.
Speaker A:Amelia Earhart first became famous as the first woman to fly across the Atlantic, but as a passenger, not the pilot.
Speaker A:And that distinction mattered to her.
Speaker A: In May: Speaker A:She made it as far as a field in Derry, Northern Ireland, buffeted by storms, ice forming on the wings and a leaking fuel gauge dripping onto her shoulder.
Speaker A:Under the circumstances, that was more than enough.
Speaker A:She had proved what she set out to do.
Speaker A:She could do it herself.
Speaker A:Under her own power and on her own terms, she set records for speed, for altitude, and for distance.
Speaker A: Throughout the: Speaker A:She pushed for women to be taken seriously in the air at a time when most people thought the very idea was faintly ridiculous.
Speaker A: Then, in: Speaker A:Somewhere over the Central Pacific, she and her navigator, Fred Noonan, disappeared.
Speaker A:No wreckage was ever conclusively found, and no bodies had been recovered.
Speaker A:She was 40 years old and had already changed aviation forever.
Speaker A:If Amelia Earhart is the name that everyone knows, then I think Beryl Markham is the one that everyone should.
Speaker A: Born in England in: Speaker A:She became the first woman licensed as a racehorse trainer in Kenya.
Speaker A:She was, by any measure, already extraordinary before she took to the air.
Speaker A: e learned to fly in the early: Speaker A: In September: Speaker A:Flying against the prevailing winds.
Speaker A:The eastward crossing had been done.
Speaker A:Flying west was harder, longer and colder because that wind was working against you every mile of the way.
Speaker A:She took off from England just before midnight, and 21 hours and 25 minutes later, her fuel exhausted, her engine sputtering, she crash landed in a bog in Cape Breton Island, Nova Scotia.
Speaker A:Barely, but she had made it the first person ever to to fly the Atlantic solo, east to west.
Speaker A:These women came from different countries, different eras, and in different circumstances.
Speaker A:Some flew in wartime, some in peacetime.
Speaker A:Some fought for their country while others fought for their right to be in the air at all.
Speaker A:What I think they shared was a refusal, be that quiet or loud or gentle or ferocious, to accept that the sky belonged to anyone but them.
Speaker A:I love these stories so much that I've based one of my series on them.
Speaker A:Co written with John Hopton, Our Nora Sierra Bird Airborne Adventures follow the pursuits of a retired Air Force pilot who just wants to be left alone to run her flight school in the Caribbean.
Speaker A:Of course, the world has other plans.
Speaker A:Her adventures start in the Shadow of the Sunstone.
Speaker A:If you're interested, you can find it wherever books are.
Speaker A:The Shadow of the Sunstone this is the Adventure Story Podcast.
Speaker A:Thank you so much for hanging out today.
Speaker A:It's great to do episodes like this and get to go behind the books a little bit because you might have seen the stories that I've written, but maybe you don't know the things that inspire those stories, the real lives that we've sort of looked into and thought about when coming up with our characters.
Speaker A:So as I say, if you're interested in aviation and thriller novels and adventure stories surrounding aviation, do check out the Nora Sierra Bird Adventure Stories wherever books are sold now.
Speaker A:If you've enjoyed the show, please subscribe.
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Speaker A:And if you need more adventure in your life, and I think you probably do, don't we all, you might like to join the Adventure Society.
Speaker A:This weekly newsletter is your ticket to travel with me to share real world adventures and to find out when a new story or a new season of this podcast drops.
Speaker A:Link is in the show notes.
Speaker A:And if you're a fan of adventure stories like the one we've talked about today, check out my books, thecrichensonauthor.
Speaker A:Com.
Speaker A:Bon voyage.
Speaker A:Enjoy the adventure and I'll see you next time.
