In 1940, a year after she graduated from college, she decided that she wanted to fly airplanes. She took lessons and became a pilot. 

A year later she was a flight instructor in Hawaii and was giving a lesson when she saw Japanese airplanes heading toward Pearl Harbor. They fired on her, but she survived. The next year she was one of a small group of women chosen to be members of the Women’s Auxiliary Flying Squadron, which took new planes from factories to military bases. “The women often flew in open cockpits in sub-freezing temperatures without radios or other equipment now taken for granted,” historian Rob Simbeck wrote in a book called Daughter of the Air: The Brief Soaring Life of Cornelia Fort.

Cornelia Fort was killed in a mid-air collision in 1943. Today a small airport in Nashville is named for her.