“I know a girl pilot who would fly any single-engine airplane over any ocean or mountain,” she blurted out before she could lose her nerve.
“And who might that be?” Jack asked.
“Me,” Jerrie answered without missing a beat. She could sense he was amused rather than impressed, but she wasn’t backing down. It had been far too long since she’d flown either for work or pleasure, and she was tired of people not taking a girl pilot seriously.
“You’re a woman, and flying is a man’s job. I’m not saying that women shouldn’t fly—for fun or sport,”—he made this small allowance—“but as a career, it’s no good. They haven’t got the stamina or the temperament. It’s a rare woman who can compete with the men in this field.” Flying meant living out of a bag, never knowing what city or country you’d end up in at night. Flying meant erratic schedules and long hours alone in a cockpit. Flying meant no creature comforts. It was a hard, dangerous, and demanding job he told her was best left to men.
Jerrie felt her scalp prickle, she was so riled up. Through gritted teeth, she laid out her qualifications, licenses, ratings, and her 3,000 hours in the air—all of it, she added, gained without a man supporting her. She was self-sufficient and determined, but Jack wasn’t convinced she could handle full-time flying.
“For how long?” he asked. “Be honest. Don’t you think it’s just barely possible that you’re still a youngster? Flying full-time isn’t easy.”
“Mr. Ford.” She steadied herself. “You talk as though men have a monopoly on flying, not only commercially but emotionally as well! I fly because I can’t not fly, same as you.”
“Jerrie, you still haven’t answered my question. For how long.”
“’Til I buy the farm!”
Jerrie laid everything on the line, but all Jack did was shake his head. It pushed Jerrie to her breaking point. She thanked him for the iced tea and rose to leave.
“Jerrie!” She paused and turned back to face him at the sound of her name. “You put up a good fight,” he said. Jerrie smiled in spite of herself.
“If you run out of manpower, I know a girl pilot…” With that, she left Jack to his plane and his South American destination.
The next week, Jerrie was at work when the phone on her desk rang.
“Jerrie Cobb? This is Jack Ford. Touché.” She didn’t understand. “Touché,” he repeated. “You win.” He had a fleet of T-6s in New Jersey that needed to be in Peru as quickly as possible, but there wasn’t a male pilot around who would fly the single-engine trainer over water. He’d fired them all and needed someone with real moxie to take on the job, even if that someone was a girl. And so he was calling to offer her the job—that is, if everything she’d said over iced tea hadn’t just been talk. She knew she was his last resort, but she didn’t care.
“You’ve got yourself a pilot,” she told him.
Days later, Jerrie met Jack at the Miami International Airport at five o’clock in the morning. There were two T-6s on the tarmac, one for each of them, both painted in the colors of the Peruvian Air Force with bomb racks and machine guns already installed. Their destination was Las Palmas. Jack gave her plane a once-over, then handed Jerrie a set of maps with the instruction to keep her radio on and stay in formation. As an afterthought, he asked how she was feeling; privately, Jerrie was sure he cared more about his plane’s safety than hers. Then he climbed into his cockpit and signaled to Jerrie to do the same, but once inside, she couldn’t figure out how to get it started; she’d never been inside a T-6. He angrily walked back to her cockpit and pointed out the energizer pedal on the floor she had to press to start the propeller, then stalked back to his own plane. Luckily Jerrie was a fast learner, and before long managed to get the propeller going, and she was off. But as soon as they were airborne, she lost Jack in the clouds. He’d assumed she was familiar with formation flying, which she wasn’t. Still, she held it together and made it the two and a half hours to Camaguey, Cuba. They stopped to refuel, and Jack took advantage of the opportunity to chew her out for not following his scant instructions to the letter. He wasn’t sure she’d make it to Kingston, Jamaica, in one piece.
Back in the air, Jerrie again lost Jack in the clouds and somehow managed to land a full ten minutes before him. Far from impressed, he was visibly irritated with her as they left the airport and checked in to a hotel for the night.
Their next leg the following morning was to Barranquilla, Colombia, for another refueling stop. Then it was on to Cali, where Jerrie landed first again. She was still on the runway when Jack came in for a landing, but he hit a chuckhole and ground-looped—the plane lost balance and spun around so violently it sustained significant damage. It was clear the plane would need to stay in Cali for a few days for repairs, and the pilot would be stuck with it. As Jack walked away from the accident unhurt, Jerrie was amazed to see he looked sheepish about it, but he soon snapped back to anger, this time frustrated over losing money while the plane was grounded.
“Take my plane and at least get that one delivered,” she offered.
For the first time since they’d left Miami, Jack actually smiled at her. “No, it’s your baby. You’ve brought it this far in good shape. I’m sure you can make it the rest of the route.” He patted her on the back as she climbed back into her cockpit, a small gesture Jerrie took to mean he was not only confident in her but also they were becoming friends. “You deliver it.” Leaving him behind, Jerrie took off toward a foreign land completely alone.
Navigating around the peaks of the Andes, Jerrie felt at peace. The landscape stretching out below her was serene and beautiful. She made it to her next refueling stop in Guayaquil, Ecuador, easily, but almost as soon as her wheels hit the runway, she saw what looked like the whole Ecuadorian army running toward her with rifles and pistols at the ready. What little Spanish she’d learned in high school vanished from her mind as, hands shaking, she reached for her flight case that held her immigration and clearance documents. She found the ones she needed for her stop in Ecuador, forms cosigned by the US State Department and the Ecuadorian embassy in Washington, and handed them to the man who seemed to be in charge. It was then she remembered that her plane had a Peruvian military paint job and bomb racks that she knew spoke louder than any documentation.
She was escorted from the plane and loaded into a car. As she watched the city go by, Jerrie’s hope that she was being taken to a government building vanished when she was driven into what was unmistakably an army camp; she was halfway around the world, but the barracks looked just like the ones she remembered from watching her father’s military exercises. The car finally stopped at a rudimentary wooden building. The door opened, and Jerrie was led into a small room with a wooden table and two chairs, one of which she took. A man joined her and sat in the other chair, then asked her again why she was in Ecuador. She again attempted to explain she was a ferry pilot and tried to show him her travel papers, but her efforts were fruitless. Unbeknownst to her, Peru and Ecuador were in the midst of one of their frequent skirmishes, and the appearance of a Peruvian plane had become a military event. She was moved into a drab but clean room with a dresser and rudimentary bathroom, a hurriedly assembled cell for the jail’s first-ever female prisoner. The door was shut behind her with the unmistakable sound of a lock clicking into place.
Days went by. Jerrie was kept confined to her small cell, the monotony broken at regular intervals by further questioning from military and government officials clearly still trying to figure out why she was in Ecuador. Three times a day, an unidentifiable gruel arrived from the mess hall that Jerrie couldn’t bring herself to eat. A sympathetic guard eventually brought her a far more palatable meal of rice and gravy and taught her rudimentary Spanish to pass the time.
Without warning, after twelve days in her cell, a guard came to release her. She was told that the Ecuadorian government had spoken to American officials throughout her imprisonment and determined that she was an American citizen ferrying an American plane; though P
eru had paid for it, the T-6 hadn’t yet been delivered, so it wasn’t yet Peruvian property. There had been no legal grounds to hold her in the first place, and keeping her in custody risked becoming an international incident. She could only imagine that Jack, learning she hadn’t made it to Peru, had traced her last known location and realized she had been stopped in Ecuador. Whether he cared about freeing her or getting the plane to its destination, she couldn’t say. She just wanted to get on her way.
Jerrie hurriedly signed a Spanish-language document that translators assured her was merely a statement testifying she hadn’t been mistreated. Then she returned to the airport, checked out her plane, and left before anyone could change their mind. Safely in the air, she relished in the feeling of the wind whipping around her face and through her hair, and drank in the view of the forest stretching beneath her. Flying always felt freeing, but it never felt as good as it did that day.
She landed in Las Palmas a hero, the female pilot with a brand-new plane. To the locals, she was like something out of a modern romance story.
* * *
The months after that eventful first flight passed in a wonderful blur. With every ferrying mission to South America, the foreign cities with exotic names became more familiar. Jerrie got to know the small islands and densely forested countries from the air as well as she’d known the Oklahoman fields and the wide spaces in Texas. The language barrier melted away, too. Her Spanish steadily improved, and before long she was able to communicate with the hoteliers in small towns who helped her find rooms that were sometimes palatial suites and other times cubicles with four-foot-tall walls offering a modicum of privacy. She delighted in learning the local customs, often rallying her energy for late-night fiestas lest she insult a host. She learned to carry a tarpaulin on every trip to keep out the rain if she was forced to spend a night in the cockpit. But what stood out above everything else were the friendly smiles that greeted her and the hospitality of the South American people, their generosity and eagerness to make her comfortable regardless of how much or little they themselves had. Everywhere she went, she was greeted by crowds amazed to see a female pilot in a captain’s uniform dismounting from the plane, often taking pictures of her before she took off again.
Within six months, Jack put Jerrie, the woman he’d doubted could fly at all, in charge of Fleetway’s South American ferry operations. Far from a desk job, this managerial position had Jerrie organizing the other pilots as well as flying the routes herself, often with Jack on her wing delivering a second plane.
Before long, an unforeseen challenge arose. It happened without Jerrie even realizing it. As she spent weeks exploring foreign lands with Jack on those trips, she started thinking of him as more than a friend. But she couldn’t imagine her feelings would be reciprocated. With his movie-star good looks he could have passed for Cary Grant’s brother, and he was notorious for dating movie stars when he was home in Burbank. The roguish, handsome pilot had his pick of women Jerrie knew were far more glamorous than she was. So she put her feelings aside.
Jerrie and Jack were flying formation somewhere over the Caribbean Sea one day delivering a pair of T-6s to Peru. The flight was perfectly routine until, out of nowhere, a loud pop caught Jerrie’s attention. Almost immediately she saw oil spewing from her engine and coating the canopy. She’d lost a propeller seal. “Can’t see outside,” she called to Jack over the radio, not wanting to waste time on needless words. “I’m flying by instruments now.”
“I’m on your left wing,” his reply came crackling through, “coming closer now…Looks like we’ll have to ditch. We’re too far to return to Cuba, and Jamaica’s another eighty miles. I doubt we can make it.”
Despite her slowly mounting panic, the relentless stream of data she was relaying to Jack about her engine pressure, and his instructions to keep her on their current flight path, she hadn’t missed his use of the word “we.” “What do you mean, we’ll have to ditch?” she demanded. There was no reason for Jack to risk himself. Trying to land on water blind without breaking the plane apart was going to be hard. She needed him in the sky guiding her, not following her on a suicide mission.
Jack ignored Jerrie’s question and continued with his instructions. “Pull your raft out from under your parachute,” he instructed. “Check your Mae West straps,” he called and she checked that her life jacket was secure. “Get everything ready to ditch. No loose items in the cockpit that can turn into projectiles in a crash. You’ll need help landing in those waves blind. I’m going with you.” Jerrie couldn’t believe it. This wasn’t the Jack she knew, the Jack who cared more about a plane than its pilot, the Jack who wouldn’t dare risk his own perfectly good airplane just because hers was going down.
Oil started leaking into the cockpit, covering Jerrie’s instrument panel. “I’ll need your help with headings, speeds, altitudes as all the instruments are covered in oil,” she called. “Don’t go in with me. I know about rafts, and I’m a strong swimmer. I’ll make it through.”
“Forget what the book says, slide your canopy all the way back and jam it with something. Or it’ll slam shut on impact, and you’ll drown because you won’t be able to get out. I’m with you all the way. Airplanes are expendable, good pilots are not.” He paused for a moment. “I didn’t wait thirty-six years to lose the love of my life now.”
The disbelief that hit Jerrie seemed to stop the drama unfolding in her cockpit momentarily. In spite of everything, a grin spread across her face. Suddenly, the prospect of ditching blind into the ocean seemed easy; the oil coating her canopy seemed like a minor nuisance. She had the love of her life at her side. Anything was possible.
“You still there?” Jack’s voice broke through her reverie. “Call out oil pressure. We’re going to try for a long glide to the Jamaican coast. I can just see it now on the horizon.”
Still slightly dazed, Jerrie listened as Jack called to the ground that their two-plane formation would be making an emergency landing in Montego Bay. She flew by the sound of his voice. He matched her pace to tell her her airspeed, altitude, and heading, guiding her unpowered plane to a runway she couldn’t see. They both knew she only had one chance to make it. “Nose up,” he called, and she pulled the control stick back in response. Jerrie braced herself for the sound of a crash and the feeling of her tail kicking up in the air as her plane flipped end over end, but it never came. Instead, she heard the unmistakable squeal of one, then both tires hitting the tarmac and finding their grip on the rough surface. “Right rudder,” came Jack’s voice, “easy on the brakes…a little bit to your left…” Her T-6 rolled to a stop.
Still sitting in the cockpit, Jerrie felt an almighty lurch that told her Jack had jumped up on the wing. A thumping sound seconds later told her he’d slipped in the oil and slammed into the canopy. She heard him fumble with the slick surface before he managed to wrench it open. His arms reached in, found her, and lifted her easily from her seat and down to the tarmac. He wiped a tear from her face leaving a smear of oil in its place, then lifted her in an embrace, swinging her feet off the oily tarmac and spinning her in circles. She barely registered the emergency vehicles congregating around them and the damaged plane as he set her down and guided her wordlessly aboard the tow truck hauling her plane to the hangar.
Once inside, Jack went straight for the phone while Jerrie sat on the floor, still in shock. As though from a distance, she heard Jack on the phone talking to parties unknown demanding all prop seals be replaced on all the T-6s, and that someone get down to Montego immediately to fix Jerrie’s plane—he wasn’t about to lose money with it sitting in the hangar longer than it had to. “And one more thing,” he said before hanging up, “I’m unreachable the next few days.”
Jack replaced the antique phone’s mouthpiece and walked over to pull her to her feet. “After we get this oil off us we’re going to go stretch out on a beach, okay?” Jerrie smiled. Words felt unnecessary.
The pair tried to clean themselves up as best t
hey could, sopping up the oil and grease with newspaper, but that only added ink to the mess. Jerrie tried in vain to wash the gunk out of her hair in the airport’s makeshift shower but gave up. When she emerged, her blond hair turning slightly green from the mix of oil and ink, Jack had managed to find a local with a car and inside knowledge of the most romantic and secluded beaches on the island. He climbed in front while Jerrie took a seat in the back, still fussing with her hair. After what felt like hours on the road, they reached the promised beach. Without a moment’s hesitation, Jack grabbed Jerrie’s hand, and they ran into the surf, clothes and all. Jack dove in, taking Jerrie with him.
“See, I told you we were going into the ocean together,” he said as they came up for air.
“My love,” Jerrie replied without even thinking, “that’s when I knew we were kindred spirits, that we would always be together.”
Right there in the surf, still dressed in their greasy, oily clothes, Jack leaned down, pulled Jerrie in close, and kissed her. Jerrie felt the full weight of the day dissolve as though she were floating away into Jack’s arms.
All too soon their island escape came to an end. Two days later, Jerrie’s T-6 was repaired and ready to fly, and they couldn’t afford to keep it on the ground any longer. “But we’ll return again soon,” Jack told her as they set out to finish the flight they’d started.
Chapter 12
Ponca City, Oklahoma, Christmas 1954
Jerrie was exhausted. She’d picked up a last-minute ferrying job to Miami after returning from Paris and still somehow managed to get home in time for her parents’ country club Christmas Eve dinner. Tired as she was, she couldn’t deny her parents the chance to show off their jet-setting daughter to their friends. As she dressed, the phone rang. It was Jack calling from the Wichita airport, less than two hours away.
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