Heather Ann Wilson
The first female military veteran elected to a full term in the US Congress, the first graduate of the U.S. Air Force Academy to be sworn in as Secretary of the Air Force.
Category Archives: Aviation
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Elsie S Ott
In September 1941, Ott joined the Army Nurse Corps. Later, she commissioned as a second lieutenant and had assignments in Louisiana, Virginia and India. During her assignment to Karachi, Ott participated in the first air evacuation, where crews evacuated patients to Walter Reed Hospital in Washington, D.C.
Julie Hammer
Julie Hammer joined the Royal Australian Air Force (RAAF) in 1977, after completing a Bachelor of Science degree at the University of Sydney. She was originally an education officer but transferred to the Engineer Branch in 1981. Hammer was the first woman to command an operational unit in the RAAF, the Electronic Warfare Squadron.
Margaret Lang
Australian nurse Margaret Lang was matron of various Victorian country hospitals, served in the Australian Army Nursing Service (AANS) during the First World War and was founder and Matron-in-Chief of the Royal Australian Air Force (RAAF) Nursing Service during the Second World War.
Dorothy McFadden Hoover
Dorothy M. Hoover was a pioneer in the field of aeronautical mathematics and physics. The granddaughter of enslaved people, she overcame the significant obstacles facing African American women in the Jim Crow era of the twentieth century to earn advanced degrees in mathematics and physics.
Helen Gwynne-Vaughan
Helen Gwynne-Vaughan was an acclaimed mycologist, King’s College graduate, and Head of the Botany Department (as well as first female professor) at Birkbeck College long before she joined the Women’s Army Auxiliary Corps during World War I, and was made chief controller of the women deployed to France.
Jane Briggs Hart
American pilot and member of the Mercury 13 would-be astronauts
Heather Wilson
In 1998 Heather Wilson became the first woman veteran of the U.S. armed services and the second woman from New Mexico elected to the U.S. Congress.
Dulcibella Atkey
The first woman to receive a British pilot’s license after WWI
Captain Mary Therese Klinker
Captain Mary Therese Klinker was a U.S. Air Force flight nurse who died during Operation Babylift, a humanitarian mission to evacuate orphans from Vietnam.