Women Who Travel Podcast: Amelia Earhart and Bessie Coleman's Record-Breaking Flights

28.03.2024 - 17:57 / cntraveler.com

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As Women's History Month comes to a close, we dive into the stories of two pioneering pilots: Amelia Earhart and Bessie Coleman. Yet while the legend of Earhart’s aviation feats and mysterious disappearance has long gripped the public imagination, Coleman’s equally impressive career as the first African-American woman to hold a pilot license is a story that still largely goes untold. Lale chats with Dorothy Cochrane, a curator at the National Air and Space Museum in Washington, D.C., to find out more about both pilots record-breaking flights, the risks they took, the individual challenges they faced, and the ingenious ways they advocated for themselves.

Lale Arikoglu: Hi there. I'm Lale Arikoglu and this is Women Who Travel After exploring the depths of the ocean recently. We thought this would be a good opportunity to take to the skies in honor of Women's History Month and discover more about Amelia Earhart and Bessie Coleman. Amelia, of course, is known for her record-breaking flights. Brave Bessie is known for her daring barnstorming stunts. Both were good publicists, self-promoters and had ingenious schemes to fund their own flights.

Dorothy Cochrane: It's a matter of keeping these women in the limelight acknowledging who they were as pioneers, as pioneering women who were resilient, they had visions, they saw no limits for themselves.

LA: As a pilot and as a curator, and as someone who's working in the aviation space, what do these two women mean to you? How do you see them?

DC: There's such strong women who really made their own way in the world against all these odds, especially Bessie.

LA: I'm talking to Dorothy Cochrane, a curator at the National Air and Space Museum in Washington.

DC: You know the average woman at that time, whether black or white was tied to the family. They wanted to do something different. Once they both found aviation, it's what they wanted to do. So I think you look at them as always looking at life differently, wanting a different life for themselves, and then being able to persevere and make it happen in the 1920s.

LA: I'd love to hear a little bit about you first because you come from an aviation background yourself. You're a curator, but you are also a pilot.

DC: When I first came to the museum, I did not have an aviation background, and so one of the things I did was decide to get my pilot license so that I would understand and basically have a future here.

LA: That's so fascinating. So you felt like you needed to know what it was like to be in a cockpit and fly a plane to really be able to understand the work that you were doing from the