‘The day of the show, I flew so high to be incredibly careful, that I didn’t believe anybody could see me at all, but when I landed, a man who owned an airport not very far away came up and said, “We’re having a show pretty soon. How much would you charge to come fly in our show?” And that’s when I became a professional aerobatic pilot, quite by accident.”

Betty started working in air shows in a 1929 model Great Lakes airplane, a 2T1A. She met a man named Curtis Pitts, who designed aeroplanes, and was endeavouring to design a new model at that time. Betty fell in love with it, but it was only the second plane Pitts had ever designed and the only one he had built so far, so he was reluctant initially to let her acquire it. Eventually, he gave in and let her have the plane.

Skelton later flew in air shows with the Navy team, the Blue Angels.

“I think the thing I enjoyed most,” Skelton recalls in the NASA Oral History interview, “and yet was probably one of the most dangerous, was flying upside down about ten feet above the ground, cutting a ribbon with the prop of the aeroplane. If nothing else, if nothing else gives you a thrill, that will, I’ll tell you!”

Betty was selected to represent the United States in the London Daily Express Air Pageant at Gatwick Airport. With both Navy and Air Force connections, she had the opportunity to land her Pitts Special (which weighed all of 540 pounds) on a carrier – at a time when it was unheard of for a woman to go aboard. She travelled over and flew both in England and across the Irish Sea, as a guest of the RAF.

Betty was such a spirit and worked on the advertising department for Chevrolet, which in fact is how she met her husband who was working for the Ford agency at one time.

“(We were) bitter rivals and didn’t particularly like each other very much,” she laughs in her interview, “but we smoothed that out. It’s the finest thing that ever happened to me, really, by far the most rewarding and the finest.”

And here is where the interview with Betty comes into its own: how did she start working with NASA?

‘One morning I picked up the newspaper and there was a picture of seven people, they had announced the day before that they were selected as astronauts. This was in April of 1959. I thought, “Wow! Wouldn’t that be wonderful to be one of these people.” But I knew at that time that women were not considered in that category and had not been considered and probably would not be for a long, long time. And, of course, I realized this from my past experiences in flying in air shows.’

The requirement to be part of the Mercury Astronauts was to have had 1,500 hours of jet flying time, but women were not allowed to fly jets in 1959. So, Betty’s chances of becoming an Astronaut were impossible. However, three months later she received a call saying that NASA had agreed to let a woman for the first time take some of the astronaut tests they had given the original seven astronauts. Due to her background and experience in flying and the thousands of hours that she had, they wondered if she would like to do it.

In the little time she spent there working with the NASA test and the astronauts, Betty did everything she could. to try to convince them that a woman could do this type of thing and do it well. The whole experience was published  in LOOK magazine, and caused a stir amongst women pilots which started the push for women astronauts.

Valentina Tereshkova was the first Russian woman Astronaut in 1963, and in 1983 Sally Ride was the first American woman to go to space. It wasn’t until 1999, forty years after Betty’s stint at the space agency, that a female astronaut would venture to space in a commanding role: Eileen Collins was the first woman to command a Space Shuttle, taking Columbia into Earth orbit to deploy the Chandra X-ray Observatory.

Betty Skelton set numerous firsts for women in aviation, land, space exploration and advertising. I wonder what she would make of all the space exploration after her death in August 2011? What was it that made this remarkable woman strive for these distinctions?

“My heart makes me tick,” she concludes in the NASA interview, “and it’s my heart that makes me do these things, what I feel inside. As Sir Edmund Hillary said, he climbed Mount Everest because it was there. 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.”

Next time, I would love to share with you the life of Pat Moss.

Until then,

Lara x