The Sunday morning of Dec. 7, 1941, was gorgeous, all blue skies and ocean breezes. It was a perfect day for flying, just the sort of morning that Cornelia Fort loved best. A flight instructor on the Hawaiian island of Oahu, she was soaring along with a student in the cockpit of a Piper J-3 Cub, above the pineapple fields and whitecaps. The student was doing well; he was almost ready for his first solo flight. The Piper Cub turned and headed back toward the John Rodgers Airport.
Then unreality struck. “Coming in just before the last landing,” Cornelia later recalled, “I looked casually around and saw a military plane coming directly toward me. I jerked the controls away from my student and jammed the throttle wide open to pull above the incoming plane. He passed so close under us that our celluloid windows rattled violently and I looked down to see what kind of plane it was.
“The [emblem of the Rising Sun] on the tops of the wings shone brightly in the sun. I looked again with complete and utter disbelief.
“Then I looked way up and saw the formations of silver bombers riding in. Something detached itself from an airplane and came glistening down. My eyes followed it down, down, and my heart turned convulsively when the bomb exploded in the middle of the harbor. I knew the air was not the place for my little baby airplane.” Cornelia set about landing as quickly as she could. On the ground, bullets spattered around her.
At 22, Cornelia Fort, the first Tennessee woman ever licensed as a commercial pilot, was already a veteran aviator and flight instructor. She would remember the “little wedge of sky above Hickam Field and Pearl Harbor” as “the busiest, fullest piece of sky I ever saw.” She had already lived a storybook life, one that combined privilege and impetuosity, but that moment would make her a celebrity. Her life would become the stuff of legend. By the strange interaction of chance and sheer personal bravado, the unwieldy daughter of one of Nashville’s most distinguished families had made history, in exactly the way she wanted to make it.
Cornelia’s father, Rufus Elijah Fort, could trace his ancestry to the French Huguenots. A respected physician, he had become superintendent and chief surgeon of Nashville General Hospital in 1897, and in 1904 he had opened a private hospital, Fort’s Infirmary, on Seventh Avenue between Union and Church streets. Already in 1903, however, the Fort family’s fortune had been made. That year he had been named vice president and medical director of the newly founded National Life and Accident Insurance Company. Always a scrupulous man, Fort was a teetotaler who never learned to drive a car. He took much of his National Life salary in stocks that increased tremendously in value over the years.
In 1909 in Boston he married Louise Clark and brought her back with him to Nashville. He was 37; she was 22. In Nashville, Fort purchased for her a magnificent 365-acre estate that sprawled along the Cumberland River eastward from what is now Shelby Park. They called the place Fortland, and there they raised five children—Rufus Jr., born in 1910; Dudley, 1911; Garth, 1914; Cornelia, 1919; and Louise, 1926.
The Fortland soil was rich. Charles Kinle, who worked on the estate for 18 years, described it as “the most productive farm in Tennessee.” In all his time on the farm, Kinle insists, he “never used a bag of fertilizer.” A foreman, a handful of single white workers, and several black families all lived on the estate. Together they raised sorghum, corn, soybeans, oats and alfalfa. The Forts bred horses and Jersey cattle. The farm raised all its own hogs and chickens. The children had their pick of 50 Shetland ponies.
Louise Clark Fort, a founder of the Garden Club of Nashville, tended her grape arbor and oversaw a garden that boasted rows of daffodils and irises 50 yards long. A stretch of the riverbank served for a time as a public beach, complete with lifeguard, and the estate had its own water tower. The house itself was a 24-room showplace, modeled on Robert E. Lee’s ancestral home, Arlington. Dinners at Fortland were formal, whether or not there were guests, and coat and necktie were required for all the boys at Sunday dinner.
Fortland’s domestic servants included a cook, a maid and a legendarily well-educated and proper black gentleman named Epperson Bond, who acted as chauffeur, served meals and tutored Cornelia in her Latin lessons as he drove her to school.
It was Bond who drove Rufus Sr. to and from his office every day. Sometimes he would take Cornelia with him. On the way home, according to her brother Dudley, Cornelia would always demand that her father stop at the drugstore and “buy her something.” In an interview shortly before his death in 1994, Dudley Fort recalled that his father would invariably say, “It seems like every time you come, you want me to buy you something.” Cornelia’s inevitable reply was, “Well, that’s what daddies are for, isn’t it?”
Still, Rufus Fort made certain that none of his children became spoiled rich kids. Cornelia, like the rest of the Fort children, went to public school in East Nashville. “My father thought we should all go to public schools, where we would get to know people and learn to get along with everybody,” Dudley Fort explained.
Cornelia was a ravenous reader. Dudley recalled his sheer disbelief at her prowess as a speed reader.
“You cannot be reading that book that fast,” he once told her.
Cornelia took the challenge. “Pick out any page you want,” she said. “Read me two lines, and I’ll tell you the next one.”
Dudley marveled. “She had a wonderful recall, and she could do it,” he said. “There wasn’t any braggadocio at all. She was just matter-of-fact about it.”
Cornelia had a wide circle of friends, including children from a sort of extended family of National Life executives. “Cornelia excelled in what she liked, and she barely passed what she didn’t like,” recalls Elizabeth Craig Proctor, whose grandfather was a National Life founder. “She liked history, and she loved literature and anything to do with English. She was always writing. She hated math and science, and barely passed them because she wouldn’t make any effort.” There were frequent, high-spirited outings at Fortland.
Cornelia’s mother was the perfect grande dame, stately with a full head of snow-white hair. “She looked like a duchess sailing into a room,” recalls Elizabeth Proctor. At the same time, Proctor gently describes her as “rattle-brained in some ways.” Louise Clark Fort was not, by Proctor’s account, “the kind of mother who bakes cookies. The cook baked the cookies.”
Louise Fort’s elder daughter had not inherited her mother’s social graces. Never classically pretty, Cornelia was known for her vivacity. Then there was her height: By the time she was 13, Cornelia was 5 feet, 10 inches tall. Dating was a virtual impossibility.
“She just towered over the boys,” says Proctor. “She was too tall and too smart—she was far smarter than the rest of us. Cornelia was one of those girls who didn’t come into her own until she was really past the teenage stage.”
In the seventh grade, Cornelia was enrolled in Ward-Belmont, the exclusive finishing school located on the current site of Belmont University. Among the young ladies of Nashville society, who judged a girl’s popularity by the number of dance partners she could attract in an evening, Cornelia found herself at a distinct disadavantage; she was more given to deviltry. During one Ward-Belmont biology class, she and a classmate crawled out a window while the teacher was busy dissecting a frog. They crawled back in 10 minutes later, and the teacher never noticed.
Proctor maintains that “Cornelia was too smart to fuss and carry on over makeup, but she desperately wanted to be popular with boys. She was just too big and too tall and too smart to be a flirt.”
Adults liked her. “I remember my father telling me, ‘When Cornelia Fort is 30, she’s going to be the most attractive woman in Nashville,” says another longtime friend, Betty Rye Caldwell. “He loved to talk to Cornelia.” Among her own age group, however, Cornelia cultivated her circle of girlfriends. Along with Proctor, Caldwell and others, she founded the SAP club, an alternative to the more staid Ward-Belmont sororities.
Cornelia was beginning to feel her oats. Meanwhile, at home she was beginning to feel the tight reins of a strict Southern upbringing. At 17 she asked permission to join a dozen or so of her girlfriends on a monthlong tour of Europe. Rufus Fort refused.
Elizabeth Proctor’s grandfather attempted to reason with him, but to no avail. “Dr. Fort was stern, and he was pigheaded, and he was rather old to have had a daughter as young as Cornelia,” Proctor insists. “He was very set in his ways. Cornelia was bucking him in all directions.”
When Cornelia left high school, her father’s grip on her gradually loosened. She spent a year at a junior college in Philadelphia and then enrolled at Sarah Lawrence, a women’s college that was liberal enough to suit her—and to dismay her father. “That’s when Cornelia bloomed,” says Proctor. At Sarah Lawrence, she indulged her loves for music and writing. She attended symphony concerts and was chief editorial writer for The Campus, the school newspaper. “There was a complete change in her,” says Proctor. “She became self-confident because she was successful and happy at Sarah Lawrence.”
On Dec. 29, 1939, during the Christmas break of her senior year at Sarah Lawrence, Cornelia was formally presented to Nashville society. In honor of her debut, her parents hosted a ball at Belle Meade Country Club, with 400 guests, some of them from as far away as San Francisco and Providence, R.I. Despite her increased social ease and her improved self-confidence, Cornelia still bristled at the conventions of society. According to one much-repeated story, Cornelia’s mother had to bribe her debutante daughter to attend her own party.
After graduation, Cornelia made a stab at living the life that had been set out for her. She became a member of the Girls’ Cotillion Club, the Junior League, and the elite literary society called the Query Club.
And then she went flying.
Cornelia’s friend Betty Rye was dating Jack Caldwell, a part-owner of Miller Flying Service. It was Caldwell who took Cornelia up for her first flight, just about a year after her graduation from college. In a Piper Cub, they set off from Berry Field, which had just replaced McConnell Field—a landing field on the property that is now McCabe Golf Course—as Nashville’s airport.
“Cornelia wanted to find out how she’d like flying,” Caldwell says, “so I took her for just a flight around and showed her a few things about the airplane. She just ate it up like it was jelly or something. She got up and didn’t want to go back.”
Soon, Cornelia and Betty were taking their first lessons.
Young Betty Rye was less than thrilled. Cornelia, however, was exhilarated. “When we came down,” Betty Rye Caldwell remembers, “Cornelia came running toward me, and she said, ‘Oh, Betty, if we wait a couple of hours, we can take our second lesson!’ I said, ‘Cornelia, if I never see Jack Caldwell again, I’m not getting in one of those planes again.’ ” Betty waited in the car while Cornelia took her second lesson.
Cornelia Fort had found her calling. “She wanted to take lessons every hour on the hour,” recalls Jack Caldwell. “She wanted to do everything right now.”
On March 21, 1940, Cornelia’s father died. Just a month later, she made her first solo flight.
Although her iron-fisted father was gone, Cornelia’s flying was still greeted with a cool reception at Fortland. After her first solo flight, supposedly, Cornelia rushed home, thrilled with her accomplishment. Mrs. Fort was working in her garden. She listened while Cornelia described the flight; then she replied, “How very nice, dear. Now you won’t have to do that again.”
By June, Cornelia had earned her private pilot’s license, which allowed her to fly “anywhere within the limits of the continental United States.” For Cornelia, a magical door had opened. She celebrated with a party at Fortland; then she set off to fly more than 2,000 miles the first week. According to Doris Tanner, who chronicled Cornelia’s life for the Tennessee Historical Quarterly, in the course of one day, Cornelia had breakfast in St. Louis, lunched in Louisville, and made it to the Mississippi delta in time for cocktails.
Cornelia had taken her Piper Cub lessons with instructor Aubrey Blackburne. Now, with Blackburne as teacher, she moved on to the Waco UPF7, a bigger, heavier, more powerful plane. A few months after her first solo flight, she received her commercial license, which made her eligible to become Tennessee’s only female flight instructor.
The UPF7’s power gave Cornelia the chance to perform daredevil aerobatics. Flying over Fortland, she demonstrated her rolls, spins and stalls. “She tried her best to get me in that airplane,” says Kinle. “It wasn’t exactly a toy airplane, but there wasn’t a whole lot to it, because she could lean out and wave, and you could see her up there.”
Recognizing the growing threat of Hitler’s air force, the Roosevelt administration established the Civilian Pilots Training Program in 1940. The program was designed to expand the U.S. aviation industry and to teach college-age Americans to fly. One of the training sites for the program was Massey Ransom Flying Service in Fort Collins, Colo. Cornelia applied for and landed a job there as an instructor.
Louise Clark Fort had never liked her daughter’s flying, and this new development presented a fresh cause for consternation. According to Tanner, “[Cornelia] planned to drive from Nashville to Fort Collins accompanied by Kevin, her Irish setter, but Mrs. Fort was horrified by the impropriety of her daughter, a 22-year-old single girl, driving alone unchaperoned across the United States.” At Mrs. Fort’s insistence, Epperson Bond, the family chauffeur, accompanied Cornelia on the trip.
At Fort Collins, Cornelia flew 16 hours a day for six months, with the tricky winds and thin air giving her perhaps the best training she could get. Then, in October, she left for Honolulu. Two months later, on a December Sunday morning, during the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor, she had her baptism by fire.
Immediately, she was a hit with the media. It took the intervention of one of Tennessee’s U.S. senators to secure her release from Hawaii, but, when she returned to the mainland, arriving in San Francisco, she found herself being interviewed and photographed by all the city newspapers.
She arrived in Nashville in March a full-fledged heroine. Cornelia submitted to newspaper interviews and spoke to civic groups. A New York columnist told her story; she pitched war bonds in a movie short shown in theaters nationwide; she spoke at bond rallies in Syracuse and Ithaca, N.Y. On the other hand, she turned down offers for a series of lectures and radio engagements, and she denied a publisher permission to base a comic strip on her life story.
While stranded in Hawaii, Cornelia had been offered the chance to ferry planes in Canada. Now she toyed with the idea of joining the British Air Transport Auxiliary, a group of women who were ferrying planes across England. Nevertheless, she decided to stay in the States.
She bided her time, giving flying lessons in Nashville. Then she moved on to Binghamton, N.Y., where a training program using flight simulators was open to women.
On Sept. 6, Cornelia received a telegram from the War Department announcing the organization of the Women’s Auxiliary Ferrying Squadron (WAFS). If she was interested, the telegram said, she should report within 24 hours to the New Castle Army Air Base near Wilmington, Del.
“[T]he heavens have opened up and rained blessings on me,” she wired her mother. “The army has decided to let women ferry ships and I’m going to be one of them.” She left for Delaware immediately.
The WAFs were an Air Transport Command ferrying squadron under the direction of Nancy Harkness Love, a 28-year-old Vassar graduate. They were just what Cornelia was looking for. Given the WAFS’ rigorous standards, fewer than 200 women nationwide qualified, and 25 of those were already part of the British ferrying group. Ultimately, there were fewer than 50 women in the squadron.
All of the women who assembled at New Castle Army Base were like Cornelia. At home each of them had been a one-of-a-kind exception; now they were forming a cohesive unit. There were strict instructions not to fraternize with male pilots until all training was complete.
What the WAFS instructors did not understand was that Cornelia and the other women pilots were already far more experienced than most of their male counterparts. The WAFS pilots averaged 1,200 hours of flying experience, making them veteran pilots by the standards of the day. Many had already been giving flying lessons, and some had been earning their livings as barnstormers. Still, they were put through 40 days of orientation before they were allowed to fly the Army’s smallest airplanes. They spent six weeks being instructed in piloting airplanes they had already flown. In the classroom, they sat through lessons that many of them had already taught to their own students.
Still, they accepted the patronization and the condescension because they assumed that they were merely proving themselves. They assumed that, like civilian males, they would become a part of the Army Air Force in 90 days.
“Any girl who has flown at all grows used to the prejudice of most men pilots who will trot out any number of reasons why women can’t possibly be good pilots,” Cornelia wrote. “The only way to show the disbelievers, the snickering hangar pilots, is to show them.”
These women pilots—young, attractive, daring—attracted immediate media attention, and many male pilots were jealous. An unspoken rivalry ensued. Because the Army wanted to prevent any chance of airborne fraternization, the WAFs were barred from accepting rides on military aircraft. That meant that, after delivering planes in exhausting bad-weather runs, the WAFs had to return to their bases on overcrowded buses or trains. Or they had to catch commercial flights that often began and ended great distances from the bases.
When their training ended in October, the WAFs had to buy their own uniforms, which they had made at a Wilmington tailor shop. The Army Air Force wasn’t about to outfit a civilian flying corps.
At least they were flying. Several WAFs were sent to Lock Haven, Pa., to pick up and ferry Piper Cubs, called L4 Grasshoppers, to nearby bases. Cornelia wrote to her mother, describing the reception in Lock Haven: “The entire town was out to greet us. So somewhat self-consciously we climbed into 6 L4B’s & took off across the Allegheny Mts. to Allentown...in a beautiful V echelon formation. All of us felt practically historic.”
Despite the hardships of the WAFS, Cornelia had not lost her taste for the finer things in life. When she got a chance, she slipped into New York to hear Bruno Walter conduct at Carnegie Hall. Afterward, she would meet friends for a drink at ‘21.’
In Wilmington she was guest of honor at a dinner party given by Mrs. Walter Carpenter, whose husband was president of DuPont. She dated, but she was not impressed with most of the men she met. She wrote her mother:
“I met a slap-happy pilot at the Officers’ Club after the movie one night & he took me dinner dancing the next night. I hadn’t realized how hungry for dancing I was—So very few of the officers here are worth walking across the street to chat with. I’ve never seen such a group of charmless men—collectively their attractiveness is very low.... You wouldn’t believe there could be such a large percentage of strikingly commonplace men as we have collected here.”
Never one to be intimidated by professional or social position, Cornelia found herself seated at dinner one evening next to the commanding general of the Air Transport Command. She referred to him in a letter to her mother as “a nice little man.”
Cornelia had plenty of time for traveling. There were dinners at country clubs and outings to fine restaurants. Otherwise, her life alternated between frustrating waiting and grueling ferrying runs.
Conditions were often torturous. During a one-month period, Cornelia delivered 16 open-cockpit PT19s in sub-zero winds, flying with no radio—just a compass. In an article for the Woman’s Home Companion, she outlined both the joys and the grueling hardships of the work:
The attitude that most nonflyers have about pilots is distressing and often acutely embarrassing. They chatter about the glamour of flying. Well, any pilot can tell you how glamorous it is. We get up in the cold dark in order to get to the airport by daylight. We wear heavy cumbersome flying clothes and a 30-pound parachute. You are either cold or hot. If you are female your lipstick wears off and your hair gets straighter and straighter. You look forward all afternoon to the bath you will have and the steak. Well, we get the bath but seldom the steak. Sometimes we are too tired to eat and fall wearily into bed.
None of us can put into words why we fly. It is something different for each of us. I can’t say exactly why I fly but I know why as I’ve never known anything in my life.... I know it in dignity and self-sufficiency and in the pride of skill. I know it in the satisfaction of usefulness.
On Dec. 8, a year after Pearl Harbor, she wrote to her mother of weather delays and the lack of amusement for “two girls in a strange town.”
The war has brought many changes, the main one in my case being a heightened enjoyment of the very simplest things—a candle-lit dinner & a drink with friends before a fire—things I took utterly for granted in my pre-war life which seems several life-times ago.
Less than three weeks later, Fortland burned to the ground, apparently because of faulty wiring. On Feb. 2, Cornelia turned 24. Her past was dissolving around her. “I’m a birthday girl and never felt less so,” she wrote her mother. “I feel about 104 instead of 24.”
Still, she quickly shifted into a more positive gear, thanking her mother for a birthday gift of a new slip. (“I’ll feel as flossy as Mae West when I put it under my uniform.”) The night before, she reported, she had slipped off to the E.E. Du Ponts’ for dinner.
A few days later, she managed a quick trip to Nashville, where she went fox hunting in a snowstorm. Then she set off to Long Beach, Calif., where, at least at first, she thought the women pilots were being given a friendly reception. “People stare at us as we knew they would,” she wrote, “but they are friendly stares. Pilots say ‘Welcome’ & seem to mean it.”
Cornelia got used to the biggest planes she or any of the WAFs had flown alone (450-horsepower BT-13s), and she put her training to use on an instrument flight. “I really feel as if I’m a 500% better pilot than I was last fall,” she wrote. On the California base, she discovered that the Officers’ Club was “sprinkled with movie stars & silver chafing dishes filled with fried oysters & cheese—Ahem!”
By Feb. 23, the apparent early warmth of their reception was chilled by an officers’ wives’ luncheon to which the WAFs were invited. She wrote:
It was the most desperate ordeal I ever saw. Talk about being stared at & appraised & in a decidedly unfriendly fashion. Whew! They are in a frenzy of jealousy that we will co-pilot with their husbands. Of all the damned, stupid, female rot!
Col. Spake sent his Deputy to make a speech—which had a dual purpose. Theoretically it was a speech of welcome for us. Actually it was an announcement to the wives that they need not worry, that no “mixed” operations orders would be issued, i.e., no man & girl as pilot & co-pilot.
And can you believe it, the rude women applauded right in front of us! I was so livid at an exhibition whose equal I’ve never seen that I got up & walked out whereupon the other girls followed me. I hope they had the grace to be ashamed of their rudeness if not their feelings.
Cornelia continued to ferry planes. She bought a car (“a dream car this time instead of a junk heap”), which, she told her mother, “has already been a joy with its top down & the Cal. sun pouring in.” She described visits to the Cocoanut Grove and The Victor Hugo, an inn overlooking Laguna Beach.
On March 17, she sent a postcard bearing a photo of a DC-3, saying she would be flying such a plane soon. “Things are looking up,” she wrote. “I love everything about the post, the people, the planes & my grey convertible.”
Then, on March 21, almost three years to the day after her first plane ride, she was at the controls of a BT-13, flying as part of a routine ferrying expedition from San Diego to Texas. There were seven planes, some piloted by men, some by women.
Lt. Frank W. Stamme Jr. nosed his plane into a rolling dive. Cornelia could see him above her through her open canopy. He passed close enough to frighten her, and she tried to evade him.
“She zigged when he guessed she would have zagged,” said Scharr, “and he snagged her.”
Stamme’s landing gear leg snapped off the top of Cornelia’s left wing and peeled six feet of the wing back toward the center of the plane. Cornelia may have hit her head; nothing else indicated that she was conscious. Her plane rolled, then went into an inverted dive, slamming vertically into the red Texas soil. It stood there, without moving or catching fire, the engine buried two feet in the ground. Cornelia was dead.
Her funeral was held at Christ Episcopal Church. Flowers came from more than 200 people, including Gov. Prentice Cooper. Nancy Love flew in from Long Beach.
It was long rumored that a mysterious love interest from Nashville’s Lea family had sent a wedding bouquet to the funeral. If such a man existed, no one knows for certain who he was. On Jan. 28, 1942, Cornelia had typed out a will in which she asked that any money left be given to Sarah Lawrence to provide scholarships. She asked that someone take care of “my dearly beloved dog Kevin.”
Although Cornelia was found to be blameless in the crash, WAFs found their flying restricted in the wake of her death. The WAFs hoped they might eventually be accepted by the military establishments, but it never happened. They were eligible for no benefits at all, and they were disbanded in 1944. In 1977, Congress declared they had indeed been military personnel.
A group of women pilots, led by Cornelia’s friend Betty Gillies, undertook a ferrying mission three weeks after Cornelia’s death. Gillies led four primary trainers on a four-day run from Hagerstown, Md., to Calgary, Canada, a torturous run they completed at a record-setting pace for men or women. They made the run in memory of Cornelia.
After the war, in 1945, a new, small airport was constructed in East Nashville not far from Fortland. It was named in Cornelia’s honor.
She could have wanted no finer tribute. In January 1942, while confined in Hawaii awaiting evacuation to the mainland, she had written to her mother a letter that serves as her epitaph:
Books and music have been deeply personal things to me, possessions of the soul. I’ve loved the multitudinous friends in many places and their many kindnesses to me. I’ve loved the steak and red wine and dancing in smoky nightclubs, self-important headwaiters who bring the reams of French bread and wine sauces in New Orleans. I’ve loved the ice coldness of the air in the Canadian Laurentians, the camaraderie of skiing and the first scotch and soda as you sit in front of the fire
I loved my blue jeans and the great dignity of life on the ranches. I loved fox-hunting even with its snobbishness, I loved the deep pervading tiredness after six hours of timber-hopping.
I dearly loved the airports, little and big. I loved the sky and the planes and yet, best of all, I loved flying. I loved it best perhaps because it taught me utter self-sufficiency, the ability to remove oneself beyond the keep of anyone at all—and in so doing it taught me what was of value and what was not.
It taught me a way of life—in the spiritual sense. It taught me to cherish dignity and integrity and to understand the importance of love and laughter....
If I die violently, who can say it was “before my time”? I should have dearly loved to have had a husband and children. My talents in that line would have been pretty good but if that was not to be, I want no one to grieve for me.
I was happiest in the sky—at dawn when the quietness of the air was like a caress, when the noon sun beat down and at dusk when the sky was drenched with the fading light. Think of me there and remember me, I hope as I shall you, with love.
Cornelia Fort’s niece, Chloe Fort, assisted in the preparation of this article.
Correction: After doing more extensive research on Cornelia Fort for his 1999 book Daughter of the Air, Rob Simbeck found that an anecdote passed along within this story is incorrect. A quote and reference to Fort dying because male pilots were harassing her in the air has been removed from the story. Simbeck provided the following update on how Fort died:
""Cornelia Fort did not die 'because men were horrible to her when she was a pilot.' Let me admit up front that I too passed along this secondarily sourced information when I wrote about Cornelia in the Scene in 1996. But during my research for Daughter of the Air (1999, Atlantic Monthly Press), I learned that Adela Scharr, whom you quote, and many others simply passed along a rumor. I spoke with two of the six (not five) male pilots on that flight with Cornelia, studied the official reports and otherwise gathered as much primary information as I could. Cornelia and Stamme were flying wingtip to wingtip (as the others had been), something that was forbidden but that pilots did anyway as a means of learning news skills. One of them did something stupid for a quarter of a second and Cornelia crashed, apparently unconscious from the moment of impact."
