Bendix Trophy

It's so interesting because initially she started out and she wanted to be A cosmetician, she opened up a salon, I think, in New York and changed her name to Jackie Cochran.

She learned to fly in 1932, earning her license in three weeks, became the first woman to win the Bendix Trophy race in 1938, served as the director of the Women Air Force Service Pilots, many of you know as WASP, during World War II, and then made history on May 18, 1953, as the first woman to fly faster than the speed of sound.

That is just so

cool.

What a beautiful aircraft.

As it goes around in these Bendix Trophy races, you see it going around-

Mm-hmm

... like today's Reno Air Races, or I should say the Reno Air Races of the past, now the Roswell location in New Mexico.

Louise Thaden and Blanche Noyes, they were the heavy aircraft class winner of the 1929 Derby.

And Blanche competed together for the Bendix Trophy in 1936.

And it was the first year women competed against men for that prize and they won, which is kind of cool.

So it was changing who could enter and it changed who could win.

The pilots who won were not just aggressive, they were precise, and they were cold, and they did not flinch when the gauges started telling them uncomfortable things forty miles from the finish line.

Cochran entered the Bendix Trophy race for the first time in 1934.

The Bendix was the crown jewel of American air racing, a transcontinental sprint, typically Los Angeles to Cleveland, roughly two thousand miles, and the pilots who'd won it were considered the best in the country.

Jimmy Doolittle had won it.

She didn't give any of it back.

Eight hours, ten minutes, and thirty-one seconds after leaving Burbank, Jacqueline Cochran crossed the finish line at Cleveland.

First place, Bendix Trophy.

First woman in history to win it.

Within a year, she had her commercial license and her instrument rating, and within two years, she was racing.

The Bendix Trophy was the most prestigious air race in America, a transcontinental dash at full power, Burbank or Los Angeles to Cleveland, open to all comers.

Military test pilots entered career racers with factory-backed aircraft and full support teams.

The fastest pilots in the country by reputation and by record.

Now, I said I would come back to Floyd Odlum's money.

Here it is.

Every male racing pilot who competed in the Bendix Trophy had sponsors, financial backing, corporate support teams.

Howard Hughes had a personal fortune and access to resources most pilots never touched.

The image was already fixed in the national imagination, and then Turner turned his full attention to what he loved most, racing.

The National Air Races, Cleveland, Los Angeles, the Bendix Trophy for cross-country speed, the Thompson Trophy for closed-course pylon racing.

If you were an American aviation enthusiast in the 1930s, these events were your Super Bowl and your World Series and your Kentucky Derby rolled together and flown at speeds that bent the world around them.

The Thompson Trophy race was the crown jewel.

The pilots were inches above the ground on the straights, pulling hard into the turns at the pylons, cutting every foot of distance they could.

The Bendix Trophy was the transcontinental sprint, coast to coast, first airplane across winds.

Both races drew enormous crowds, 100,000 people on the best days at Cleveland, numbers that rival anything in modern motorsports.

And the pilots were stars, not just aviation stars, national celebrities, their names in newspapers, their faces on magazine covers.