Do you know the story of the first six female pilots in the Navy? This year, the Navy is celebrating 50 years of women being in aviation. And it is exciting to get a chance to read the stories of the women who took a chance to serve as the first women pilots. Beverly Weintraub wrote Wings of Gold, which shares the stories of the first women and follows their journey of not only serving but advocating for women to make changes for women pilots for future generations. If you enjoy learning the history of military women go out and get your copy of Wings of Gold today!

The First Six Female Pilots in the Navy

Beverly Weintraub is a Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist and instrument-rated private pilot. As an editorial writer for the New York Daily News, she covered topics including education, social services and aviation, and she shared the 2007 Pulitzer for Editorial Writing for an in-depth investigation into the illnesses afflicting World Trade Center rescue and recovery workers after 9/11. Her op-eds about women and aviation have appeared in the Washington Post. Bev holds tailwheel, complex and high-performance airplane endorsements and has crisscrossed the country in single-engine propeller aircraft. She lives in New York City.

How did Wings of Gold come to be?

Beverly wrote up a piece for the Washington Post, A “missing man” formation, flown by women for a woman, We pilots salute them all. That piece led Lyons Press to reach out about writing a book about the first women pilots in the Navy. Beverly was excited to take on the project and learn the stories of these women. She was supposed to travel to various locations in her research stage but the work began right as COVID shut the world down.

So she had a lot of time to do research, but didn’t get to travel. Luckily, there were a lot of articles highlighting the different events and milestones through the women’s careers. The Navy may not have been happy about women pilots. But they did know it was good press. Another way to learn more about the women was connecting with family member. Family members were able to share unique details and history with Beverly. History and political events also played an important role in the research process. Highlighting different things happening politically and was able to add that into the story to provide greater depth and context.

Another great book highlighting the stories of the first women to become pilots and the role of opening combat aircraft for women is Fly Girls Revolt. You can check out my interview with the author of Fly Girls Revolt here.