It’s a ready-made screenplay, filled with a genteel blue-eyed blonde belle with a streak of rebellion, daring deeds, tense high-speed chases of historical significance, and vast societal change – and it’s all true. At a time when many are intrigued about the possibility that aviator Amelia Earhart’s story may have continued longer than previously believed, the story of Cornelia Clark Fort is far less well known except among devotees of aviation history. For those in the know, Fort is cited as the first pilot to encounter a Japanese flyer invading Pearl Harbor and the first female pilot to lose her life in service to the military. For those even further in the know, Fort’s tale has ties to Boulder, Jefferson County, Montana.
FORT’S EARLY LIFE A daughter in a Tennesee family with four sons, Cornelia Clark Fort was born into relative extravagance in 1919. Check-six, an aviation organization that aims to “put people in touch with the past, and learn about the how the events occurred, and how the events changed aviation history, and hopefully some insight into the pilots who truly ‘pushed the envelope,’” says as a child she was chauffered from her “luxurious 24-room mansion” to private schools. She spent two years at Sarah Lawrence College, traveling to Bermuda for spring break, says the Checksix website. According to another aviation history organization, Lost Aviators of Pearl Harbor, “At an early age, in her young, independent heart, the seeds were sown for a direct passion for aviation. After her family had watched a barnstorming pilot demonstrate aviation in a Jenny, at the age of five, young Cornelia listened to her father make her brothers promise they would never fly. As either a sign of her young age, or more likely, a sign of the times, her father felt no need to evoke such a promise from his daughter.” That website says, “At the age of 15, Cornelia grasped that her junior college had been attended by Amelia Earhart, and Cornelia believed the drab environment of Ogontz Junior College inspired Amelia to free herself of those types of bonds” tying the hands of most females of the time. Having made no pledge to her father, Fort took her first flight in the winter of 1940 but kept her aspirations secret until after her father’s death soon after, say multiple aviation history sources. Her first solo flight came in April 1940, she earned her private pilot’s certificate in June of that year, and by March 1941 she held both a commercial license and an instructor’s rating.
