This daredevil fighter pilot proved that women were just as (or more) capable of conquering the skies
Cecil “Teddy” Kenyon defied expectations by testing fighter planes and bombers during WWII
In the midst of World War II, Grumman, one of the prominent producers of military aircraft, was experiencing a shortage of pilots. Bud Gillies, the company’s head of Testing and Flight Operations, decided to take what some would have considered a risk: he hired women.
One of them, Cecil “Teddy” Kenyon, was already a member of the Civil Air Corps and had been running Grumman’s “ferry service,” picking up and delivering aircraft parts. By the time the war broke out, Kenyon had been flying for years. The New York native was a born daredevil who grew up riding her brother’s motorcycle and dreaming of flying. She married Ted Kenyon, an MIT student and barnstormer, in 1926 and earned her pilot’s license three years later. In 1933, she beat twenty-eight men and eleven women to win the National Sportswomen’s Flying Championship at Roosevelt Field in New York, and took home a $5,000 prize. (She gave a portion to the friend whose plane she’d borrowed for the event, and bought her own plane with the remainder.)
At Grumman in 1942, Kenyon’s boss Bud Gillies knew that his decision to use female test pilots would draw publicity. On the day of the women’s first flights, he closed the entire airfield. He’d given most of the company’s personnel the day off, but made sure to invite the press.
The three female pilots were Teddy Kenyon, Barbara Jayne, and Lib Hooker. As Jill Lampos and Michaelle Pearson write in their 2015 volume The Remarkable Women of Old Lyme, “the photogenic ‘lady flyers’ were an instant media sensation. Newspapers and magazine featured ‘glamour shots’ of the three in full flight gear — and perfect lipstick.” But the pressure was on. Not only did the women seek to exceed the expectations of many skeptical onlookers (including their male counterparts), they were flying valuable new prototype airplanes, like the Hellcat. On one particularly harrowing 1943 test flight, following a malfunction, Kenyon was encouraged to jump and “dump” the plane , but she refused and managed to land safely.
She appeared in a Camel cigarette advertisement soon after, dolled up with her aviator goggles on her head and a smoke in between her fingers. It read, “I tame Hellcats!” Like so many women, Kenyon’s work ended when the war did, but up until the time of her death in 1985 at age 71, she was still flying.
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