Cornelia Fort, 1946Photo: Tennessee State Library and ArchivesNative Nashvillian, Cornelia Fort, was one of the first people to realize Pearl Harbor was being attacked when a Japanese plane nearly collided with a plane she and her student were flying in. Fort, an upper-class woman from a prominent Nashville family, forwent a life of luxury to pursue her love of flying. If the PBS American Experience entry about her doesn’t move you to tears a couple of times, you should probably have your doctor check your tear ducts.
Here’s their description of the Pearl Harbor events:
On December 7th, 1941 Cornelia Fort, a young civilian flight instructor from Tennessee, and her regular Sunday-morning student took off from John Rodgers Airport in Honolulu. Fort's apprentice was advanced enough to fly regular take-offs and landings and this was to have been his last lesson before going solo. With the novice at the controls, Fort noticed a military aircraft approaching from the sea. At first that didn't strike her as unusual; Army planes were a common sight in the skies above Hawaii. But at the last moment, she realized this aircraft was different and that it had set itself on a collision course with her plane. She wrenched the controls from her student's grasp and managed to pull the plane up just in time to avoid a mid-air crash. As she looked around she saw the red sun symbol on the wings of the disappearing plane and in the distance, probably not more than a quarter mile away, billowing smoke was rising over Pearl Harbor. The disbelieving Fort had just unwittingly witnessed the U.S. entry into World War II.
For years, aviation historians have been trying to locate this plane, or at least learn what happened to it. Now, the Smithsonian Magazine is reporting that it may have been found:
Now, as the 75th anniversary of the attack approaches, a former fighter pilot thinks he’s found it. Retired Air Force Lt. Col. Greg Anders, executive director of the Heritage Flight Museum in Burlington, Washington, knows that the Interstate Cadet he bought from a collector in 2013 was in Honolulu at the time of the attack; FAA records prove it.
But showing that it’s the one that Fort flew has taken some detective work. That’s because the registration number on his aircraft, NC37266, isn’t the same as the number penned in her logbook, NC37345. Why the difference? He argues that her logbook, which is archived in the Texas Woman’s University Libraries, is not the original document but a copy she made after a December 1942 fire at her family’s Nashville home destroyed many of her belongings. Anders discovered that the registration number in her logbook belonged to an aircraft that hadn’t even been built by the time of her first notation. Of the 11 other Cadets that have a paper trail to Pearl Harbor, Anders says he’s got the one that best fits the timing and description of Fort’s.
This was, I believe, the same fire that destroyed her family home, which stood near the Cornelia Fort airport, which is now a part of Shelby Bottoms. Anyway, this evidence sounds promising and it would be nice to have located this piece of history.
