Ms. Betty Skelton Passes Away at Age 85

[Okie_Pilot]

A true American hero. R.I.P. Betty

The “inverted ribbon cut” was one of Betty Skelton’s most daring maneuvers, in which she flew her single-seat, open-cockpit biplane upside down at about 150 miles per hour, maybe 10 feet above the ground, and sliced through a ribbon stretched between two poles.

In a race car, Ms. Skelton set women’s land-speed records; in one 1956 event she hit 145.044 m.p.h. in her Corvette on the sand flats of Daytona Beach, Fla. (The men’s record at the time was just 3 m.p.h. faster.)

Whether in the air or on land, Ms. Skelton, who died on Aug. 31 at the age of 85, was a celebrated daredevil who shattered speed and altitude records. She was a three-time national aerobatic women’s flight champion when she turned to race-car driving, then went on to exceed 300 m.p.h. in a jet-powered car and cross the United States in under 57 hours, breaking a record each time.

“In an era when heroes were race pilots, jet jocks and movie stars, Betty Skelton was an aviation sweetheart, an international celebrity and a flying sensation,” Henry Holden wrote in his 1994 biography, “Betty Skelton: The First Lady of Firsts.” Her “enviable record,” he added, “is still recognized today by pilots and competitors.”

She also broke gender barriers.

“Betty proved that women were capable of professional aerobatic flight competition,” said Dorothy Cochrane, curator of general aviation at the National Air and Space Museum of the Smithsonian Institution, where Ms. Skelton’s Pitts S-1C plane, Little Stinker, hangs, upside down, near the entrance. “She paved the way for women like Betty Stewart, Mary Gaffney and Patty Wagstaff, who in 1991 became the first woman to win the national championship competing against both men and women.”

In 1960, Ms. Skelton appeared on the cover of Look magazine, in an astronaut’s flight suit, next to the headline: “Should a Girl Be First in Space?”

Ms. Skelton, who never grew beyond 5-foot-3 and about 100 pounds, acquired her passion for speed as an 8-year-old redhead perched on her porch in Pensacola, Fla., finding herself riveted by the pilots from the nearby Navy base swooping overhead. Entering competitive flying, however, she was matched against only other women, winning the United States Feminine Aerobatic Championship in 1948, 1949 and 1950.

While the gender divide has disappeared — men and women both compete in what are now known simply as the United States National Aerobatic Championships — the maneuvers required to win the title are essentially the same as those in Ms. Skelton’s day.

One is the hammerhead, in which the pilot soars vertically to a certain altitude, snaps the plane 180 degrees and roars straight down before pulling up. Judges also rate precision in the triple snap roll, which requires three horizontal 360-degree rolls while maintaining altitude. Another feat is the outside loop, a circle flown around a point in the sky with the cockpit facing outward.

“Difficult in an open-air cockpit like Betty’s Pitts,” Ms. Cochrane said. Difficult, too, on the day in 1949 when Ms. Skelton became the first woman to perform the inverted ribbon cut at an airfield in Oshkosh, Wis. In an oral history for the National Aeronautics and Space Administration in 1999, she recalled how risky the maneuver was.

The first time she tried it, she said, “I misjudged slightly and flew underneath the ribbon, which put me even closer to the ground.”

“I never made that mistake again,” she added.

During six years as a competitive pilot, Ms. Skelton set a series of women’s records for light planes, among them reaching 29,050 feet in a Piper Cub at an airfield in Tampa, Fla., in 1951. She traveled the air-show circuit around the country, performing what she declined to call stunts.

“I considered it an art,” she said, “and I spent a great deal of time trying to convince people that it was not simply diving to thrill a crowd, to make a lot of noise and to put out a lot of smoke. It was an art that took many thousands of hours to perfect.”

By 1951, Ms. Skelton had become friends with Bill France Sr., a founder of Nascar, who had little difficulty persuading her to slip behind the wheel of a stock car during Speed Week at Daytona Beach. She went on to set a series of women’s land-speed records.

In addition to the 145.044 m.p.h. she reached in her Corvette in 1956, she set a transcontinental speed record (for both sexes) that year, driving from New York to Los Angeles in 56 hours, 58 minutes. In 1965, on the Bonneville Salt Flats in Utah, she took a jet car, the Green Monster Cyclops, to a top speed of 315.74 m.p.h.

By then, she had also become the first woman to be hired as a test driver in the auto industry and a spokeswoman for Chevrolet, appearing at auto shows and in national print advertisements and television commercials.

At news conferences, she was often asked, “What makes you tick?”

“My heart makes me tick” was her ready response, she said in the 1999 interview, “and it’s my heart that makes me do these things. I don’t think I have any better answer than that, except that everyone is built a little differently, and my heart and my will and my desires are mixed up with challenge.”

Ms. Skelton was inducted into 10 halls of fame, including the International Aerobatic Hall of Fame in 1988 and the Corvette Hall of Fame in 2001. She died at her home in The Villages, Fla., Ms. Cochrane said.

Born on June 28, 1926, in Pensacola, she took her first solo flight at 12, not old enough under the law. She was already enthralled by those overhead Navy flights (and model planes and aviation magazines) when her parents, David and Myrtle Skelton, began taking her to a local airport and allowing her to hop rides on private planes.

She soloed legally on her 16th birthday and soon after earned her license. An aerobatic pilot, Clem Whittenback, taught her how to do a loop and roll for a charity air show that her father was organizing.

Ms. Skelton’s first husband, Donald Frankman, died in 2001. She later married Allan Erde, her sole immediate survivor.

In 1991, when Patty Wagstaff became the first woman to win the American aerobatics championship in a competition with men, Ms. Skelton sent her a letter, at one point referring to the plane she had flown to fame. “Receiving my first Medicare card a few months ago was not much of a thrill,” Ms. Skelton wrote. “I wanted to burn it immediately and go out and buy a Pitts!”

Well into her 80s, she continued to drive her Corvette.

source: http://www.nytimes.com/2011/09/11/us/11skelton.html?_r=3&ref=todayspaper