(b. 19 18)
The first American woman to fly a jet aircraft. Ann Baumgartner was born in August 1918 in Augusta, Georgia, while her father served with U.S. forces in France. She grew up in New Jersey and graduated from Smith College with a degree in biology.
Baumgartner and her mother were visiting family in England at the outbreak of World War II. She learned to fly in 1940 and began training as a Women Airforce Service Pilot (WASP) in early 1943 at the Houston (Texas) Municipal Airport. A temporary illness sent her home midway through her WASP training. She was able to return and finish her training at Avenger Field near Sweetwater, Texas, graduating with class 43-W-5 in September 1943. She was then assigned to Camp Davis, North Carolina, a base notorious for its poor treatment of the women stationed there and the site of several accidents in which WASP were killed. There, as part of a tow-target squadron, she flew planes trailing cloth targets for target practice from the ground.
In February 1944, Baumgartner moved temporarily to Wright Field near Dayton, Ohio, to test high-altitude, low-temperature equipment for WASP and other female pilots. She helped design a female attachment to the relief tube that allowed pilots to urinate in flight. Baum-gartner transferred permanently to Wright Field the next month when she reported to the Fighter Flight Test (FFT) Branch to test a variety of airplanes. For a few weeks, she even flew for the Bomber Flight Test (BFT) Branch. When she returned to the FFT Branch, Baumgartner became the first American woman to pilot an airplane powered by jet propulsion, the top-secret YP-59A, on October 14, 1944.
Orville Wright, who visited Wright Field often, is said to have enjoyed his conversations with Baumgartner. She met her husband, Bill Carl, at Wright Field where he was an aeronautical engineer serving as the liaison officer between the National Advisory Committee for Aeronautics (NACA) and Wright Field. His conceptual design, which Baumgartner helped test, of two P-51 Mustang fighters connected into one aircraft became the XP-82, the "fastest prop-driven fighter . . . with the longest range" (Carl 1999, 105). The WASP was disbanded in December 1944, and they married in May 1945.
When the National Air and Space Museum opened in Washington, D.C., in 1976, the Flight Testing Gallery exhibit included the XP-59A, the first plane powered by jet propulsion, and recognized Baumgartner as the first woman to fly a jet, although the plane she flew was the YP-59A. In 1992, Baumgartner gave a lecture with General Laurence Craigie, the first U.S. Air Force pilot to fly a jet, at the National Air and Space Museum to celebrate fifty years of jet flight. In March 2001, she was inducted into the Women in Aviation International Pioneer Hall of Fame.
