Jacqueline Cochran: Aviation Pioneer

Jacqueline Cochran was an American pilot and business executive who pioneered women's aviation—and she was one of the most prominent racing pilots of her generation.

Jackie Cochran rose to become one of history’s most accomplished female aviators.

As an aviation pioneer, her life was characterized by a series of “Firsts”: she was the first civilian awarded the U.S. Distinguished Service Medal; the first woman to break the sound barrier (1953); the first woman to break Mach 2 (1960); the first woman to pilot a bomber across the North Atlantic (1941); the first woman inducted into the Aviation Hall of Fame; the first pilot to make an instrument landing; the first woman President of the Federation Aeronautique lnt'l; and the first pilot to fly above 20,000 feet with an oxygen mask; the first woman to compete in the famous Bendix Trophy Transcontinental Race across the U.S. (1934)—and was the first woman to win it (1938).

Cochran was the wartime head of the Women Airforce Service Pilots (WASP) (1943–44), which employed about 1000 civilian American women in a non-combat role to ferry planes from factories to port cities during World War II.

In addition, in 1953 and 1954, the Associated Press named her "Woman of the Year in Business" for her cosmetics business.

Here is her extraordinary story…

Jacqueline Cochran was born Bessie Lee Pittman, in Pensacola, Florida as the youngest of the five children of Mary and Ira Pittman, a skilled millwright who frequently relocated, setting up and reworking sawmills. While her family was not wealthy, there was always food on the table, and Cochran's childhood living in small-town Florida was similar to those in other families of the era.

From an early age, Jackie Cochran set out to mold an identity that was both flexible and unforgettable.

With her awareness that evolution is essential to survival, Jackie recognized that every person and every experience that touched her life could, and should, change her. And she enjoyed that change, never fearing that she would lose herself. Cochran was always eager to discover the person evolving just below the surface.

At the age of six, Jackie went to work in a Georgia cotton mill, earning six cents an hour for a 12-hour day. She instinctively knew that somewhere beyond the gritty hand-to-mouth existence of her childhood lay a world of endless opportunity and adventure. She longed to explore that world and embrace its opportunities. When a schoolteacher named Miss Bostwick took Jackie under her wing, her confidence grew and she began to plot her escape from small town Florida.

By age seven, she was cooking and cleaning – and occasionally midwifing for pregnant women around town. At ten, she presented herself to a local beauty parlor owner and begged for a chance to do odd jobs. She would eagerly claim expertise at jobs or projects unfamiliar to her. “I added and subtracted information at will, as it suited me,” she said years later. “I didn’t see it as lying, so much as survival.”

Circa 1920, at 14 years old, she married Robert Cochran and gave birth to a son, Robert, who died in 1925 at the age of 5. After the marriage ended, she kept the name Cochran and began using Jacqueline or Jackie as her given name. Cochran then became a hairdresser and got a job in Pensacola, eventually moving to New York City.

At the beauty parlor, Jackie made it her business to absorb everything. She learned to operate the brand new permanent wave machines and quickly established herself as one of the first competent permanent wave specialists. She parlayed her skill into more money and better jobs. Struggling to connect meaning and direction in her life, she attended nursing school and accepted a position with a doctor’s office in Bonifay, Florida. But she was never fully comfortable with the idea of a career in medicine, and Jackie quickly realized that she could not face the emotional demands of nursing in a depressed Southern community. “In the beauty shop customers came in looking for a lift…and unless I really screwed up, they left with that lift,” she recalled.

In Pensacola, she used her looks, skill as a beautician, and driving personality to get a job at a prestigious salon at Saks Fifth Avenue in New York City.

Whatever Jackie lacked in life experience, she made up for in audacity and iron will. Hard-driving and intense, she would make a career of proving her detractors wrong when they argued that her objectives were unachievable.

By 1932, she ranked among the top hairdressers in New York, frequently accompanying her devoted customers as they vacationed in Europe or wintered in Miami.

One day, after a visit to Miami, Cochran sat down beside Floyd Bostwick Odlum, founder of Atlas Corp. and CEO of RKO in Hollywood at a society dinner party. Odlum would remember her that evening as tough and determined, yet oddly vulnerable.

For Jackie, Floyd Odlum was everything she longed to be: successful, fun-loving and confident. He was also married with children, but Jackie was unaware of that complication as she launched into a dinner conversation with him. She earnestly regailed Floyd with her ambitions and convictions; bubbling over over with hopes, dreams and opinions. Her energy and enthusiasm were contagious and highly appealing to a man bored by the idle chatter of society women.

Others saw a different dimension to Jackie.

“Jackie Cochran was one of the prettiest women I ever saw,” recalled journalist Adela Rogers St. John. “I doubt if her pictures ever did her justice, because pictures can’t reproduce those big, soft brown eyes, the shimmering hair or the lovely clear skin.”

Fourteen years her senior, Floyd Odlum was reputed to be one of the 10 wealthiest men in the world. Odlum became enamored of Cochran and offered to help her establish a cosmetics business.

When Jackie confided that she was considering selling cosmetics on the road, Floyd warned that the economic depression would make success a tall order. He advised that she might get an advantage over her competition by learning to fly.

Jackie returned to New York some weeks later, her mind reeling with two new obsessions…flying and Floyd.

“He was rare. He was unique,” she later said of the man who would guide her career and change her life. “We had a lot in common. I felt sure I had met my destiny.” Indeed, the chance meeting and the ensuing friendship would complete Jackie’s panicked flight from poverty and obscurity. As her relationship with Floyd simmered quietly, her passion for aviation exploded in a very public way.

Floyd Odlum had told Cochran that flying would help her surpass her competition.

In 1932, a friend offered her a ride in an aircraft, and Cochran immediately began taking flying lessons at Roosevelt Airfield, Long Island and learned to fly an aircraft in three short weeks.

Even in her first moments at the stick, she displayed an immediate feel for the airplane. Her comfort level was such that she wondered how she could have survived for so long without this reason for living. But Jackie’s joy of flying was balanced by her fear of written tests. A lack of formal education left her terrified of the written phase of her pilot’s exam. She pleaded with former boyfriend Mike Rosen to help her prepare for the challenge. By the time Jackie began her hands-on flight training, she and Rosen had invested countless hours in study and discussion.

She then soloed and within two years obtained her commercial pilot's license.

Encouraged and supported by Floyd, Jackie threw herself into advanced flight training. She knew now that her destiny lay in the cockpit, but she was not content to be among the handful of female pilots peppering the skies over America. She wanted to be the best, male or female.

But Jackie Cochran’s love affair with flying was not without its “pilot induced oscillations.” Indeed, Jackie’s life was never complete without turbulence, almost always self-inflicted.

The budding pilot’s next hurdle was convincing the examiner to allow her to take the test verbally. As would be the case again and again in her life, by sheer force of will, Jackie prevailed.

Her first course of action, two days after gaining her license, was to fly solo to a Canadian sports pilots’ meet.

Two days after earning her pilot’s license, she borrowed an airplane from a highly skeptical M.E. Grevenberg, who demanded that she cover the purchase price of the airplane as a security bond. With the ink barely dry on her pilot’s license and no practical cross-country experience, Jackie took off from New York and headed toward a sport pilots’ meet in Montreal, Canada.

She was fully aware that Grevenberg never expected to see her – or his airplane – again. That knowledge only reinforced her determination to make a safe, if eventful, journey.

Indeed, it was an eventful trip during which Jackie flew by the seat of her pants, learning to read air maps and the compass as she went. By the trip’s end she knew two things for certain: she never wanted to stop flying and she had much to learn if she hoped to make it a career.

After getting lost somewhere along the Hudson River, Jackie landed at a small airport and asked for directions. The airport attendant was stunned when the novice pilot admitted that she not only didn’t know which way Montreal was, she also could not read a compass.

Jackie shrugged it off when the attendant turned heel and headed away from her, shaking his head in wonder. Several minutes later he returned with a handful of men who began pushing Jackie’s aircraft in circular motions around the field.

“Watch that compass,” he barked. She complied and began to absorb her first lesson in navigation, observing the movement of the compass needle. Still uncertain of her navigational skills she pressed the attendant for landmarks or geographic formations that she might follow to Montreal. He suggested she be on the lookout for two silos that would indicate she had managed to stay on course.

It wasn’t much by which to and Jackie took off fully aware that everyone on the ground strongly questioned both her sanity and the likelihood that she would end up anywhere close to Montreal, if she even managed to survive the trip.

But Jackie made it to the silos and, eventually, to Montreal. There she met up once again with Grevenberg, who was sufficiently impressed with her piloting skills that he hitched a ride back to New York with her.

After being a fog forced her down near Syracuse, Jackie decided that three weeks of flight training was not nearly enough. She instinctively knew that the sky would be her second home, and that her safety and efficiency would hinge on a revolutionary concept – blind flight.

When Grevenberg told her she must hone her knowledge of instrument flying, she was dumbfounded. Who ever heard of such a thing? But, in typical Jackie style, the seed, once planted, grew voraciously. Fed up with East Coast weather conditions, she decided to take her flying westward to the Ryan Flying School in San Diego. There she struggled anew with her aversion to classroom work until a Navy buddy offered one-on-one tutelage “the Navy way.”

Throughout 1933 Jackie practiced every flight maneuver known to man, mastering spot landings, figure 8s, turns, spins and emergencies. Frustration and embarrassment were constant companions, but Jackie was determined to conquer and control the demons that drove her skyward. Despite the emotional drain of studying, Jackie learned that the intensity of flight served to calm the “can’t sit still buzz” that dogged her throughout her life. She also discovered that she had fallen in love with the California desert.

“I didn’t agree with Jackie about the desert,” recalled Vi Strauss Pistell, who managed Cochran’s household for 30 years, “but there was no disagreeing with Jackie. Nobody was like her. She was an amazing, intelligent woman. She always loved clothes and had beautiful outfits…she’d come in from breaking one of those records, wash her own hair, and be ready to go again. People always said she had a hairdresser, but she usually did her own hair.”

But in 1933 Jackie was not yet in the hunt for world records, or even personal hair dressers. She was, however, winning her battle with flight studies, as well as the heart of millionaire Floyd Odlum, who she had met the previous year in Miami.

By the autumn of 1933 Jackie and Floyd were openly discussing the deepening of their friendship. It would be another three years before the couple decided to marry. Even then their relationship would be non-traditional by mid-20th Century standards, with both parties pursuing their own individual projects at break-neck speed.

Although Cochran denied her family and her past, she remained in touch with them and provided for them over the years. Some of her family moved to her ranch in California after she remarried. They were instructed to always say they were her adopted family. Cochran apparently wanted to hide from the public the early chapters of her life and was successful in doing so until after her death.

Indeed, Jackie Cochran’s ability to invent and reinvent herself was, perhaps, a more compelling quality than her innate piloting skill-which was substantial – or her legendary commanding personality.

Glennis Yeager recalled the unique bond shared by the duo. “Jackie never walked through a room if Floyd was there without going over to him to give him a little pat. Jackie and Floyd had a kind of sixth sense about each other. They could always tell when one or the other was in trouble. They just knew, without communicating directly.”

Yvonne Smith, a long-time family friend, remembered both Jackie and Floyd as “so darn independent, so strong willed and so naturally intelligent. Jackie and Floyd communicated constantly during their marriage. They would seem so separate, but they were actually inseparable in a sense.”

Over the years, the relationship would be tested by Floyd’s rheumatoid arthritis, which left him disabled and in constant pain for most of his adult life. In the end, the couple’s mutual love for the desert would give Floyd some control over his crippling condition, according to Jackie.

“The ranch would save Floyd’s life at a time when almost everyone told him to go to bed and live from there,” she recalled.

Aviation became Jackie’s life. She found the home and family that she had missed as a child in airports and among the fraternity of pilots. It didn’t take Jackie long to realize that she had spent her life thus far as a pilot in search of a plane. Now, finally, she had assembled both sides of the equation. The fact that aviation was still very much a male-dominated industry did not daunt the ambitious beautician.

In 1934 Jackie tackled the MacRobertson London-to-Australia air race. She opted to do so in one of the most dangerous aircraft of the period, the Gee Bee.

“The cute nickname is a sham,” she recalled years later. “They were killers. There were very few pilots who flew Gee Bees and then lived to talk about it. Jimmy Doolittle was one. I was another.”

She was one of only three Americans in the race, and the only American woman. Despite Jackie’s consuming desire to win and claim the $75,000 cash prize, her first race proved to be a dangerous comedy of errors. It began when Jackie found in flight that the on/off switches for the gas tank were mislabeled. It ended with a thud as the Gee Bee belly flopped onto a Romanian runway following a life-and-death struggle to force the flaps to operate in tandem. There was no MacRobertson victory, no $75,000, for Jackie Cochran.

But Jackie’s competitive nature would not accept defeat. Air racing became second nature and by 1935 Jackie was testing her mettle in the Bendix transcontinental. Although she didn’t win in 1935, she earned first place in the women’s division (third overall) in 1937 and became the first woman to make a blind landing.

After that, the floodgates opened and Jackie Cochran began to stack up aviation records like cordwood.

She would eventually become the first woman to win the Bendix, the first woman to pilot a bomber across the Atlantic Ocean, and the first woman to: receive the Distinguished Service Medal; break the sound barrier; take-off and land from an aircraft carrier; attain a flying speed of 842 mph, and serve as President of the Federation Aeronautique Internationale.

Jackie would also become the moving force behind “Jacqueline Cochran Cosmetics” in 1935. The company, born of her passion for style and beauty, would be a major player in the American cosmetics industry until well after Cochran’s death in 1980.

Odlum, whom she married in 1936 after his divorce, was an astute financier and savvy marketer who recognized the value of publicity for her business. Calling her line of cosmetics Wings to Beauty, she flew her own aircraft around the country promoting her products. Years later, Odlum used his Hollywood connections to get Marilyn Monroe to endorse Cochran's line of lipstick.

In 1937, she was the only woman to compete in the Bendix race and worked with Amelia Earhart to open the race to women. That year, she also set a new women's world speed record.

Before the United States joined World War II, Cochran was part of "Wings for Britain", an organization that ferried American-built aircraft to Britain, becoming the first woman to fly a Lockheed Hudson V bomber across the Atlantic. In Britain, she volunteered her services to the Royal Air Force. For several months she worked for the British Air Transport Auxiliary (ATA), recruiting qualified women pilots in the United States and taking them to England where they joined the ATA. Cochran attained the rank of Flight Captain (equivalent to a Major in the U.S. Air Force) in the ATA.

By 1938, she was considered the best female pilot in the United States. She had won the Bendix and set a new transcontinental speed record as well as altitude records.

Cochran was the first woman to fly a bomber across the Atlantic.

As the world spiraled toward global conflict in the late 1930s, Jackie grew restless…unable to contain her desire to make a difference, to strike her own personal blow against the Axis powers.

By 1939, Jackie was hatching a plan through which female pilots would “free a man to fight” by ferrying aircraft, towing targets or flying in other non-combat capacities.

In September, 1939, Cochran wrote directly to Eleanor Roosevelt to introduce the proposal of starting a women's flying division in the Army Air Forces. She felt that qualified women pilots could do all of the domestic, noncombat aviation jobs necessary to release more male pilots for combat. She pictured herself in command of these women, with the same standings as Colonel Oveta Culp Hobby, who was then the director of what would become known as the Women's Army Corps (WAC).

That same year, Cochran wrote a letter to Lieutenant Colonel Robert Olds, who was helping to organize the Air Corps Ferrying Command for the Air Corps at the time. (Ferrying Command was originally a courier/aircraft delivery service, but evolved into the air transport branch of the United States Army Air Forces (USAAF) as the Air Transport Command). In the letter, Cochran suggested that women pilots be employed to fly non-combat missions for the new command. In early 1941, Olds asked Cochran to find out how many women pilots there were in the United States, what their flying times were, their skills, their interest in flying for the country, and personal information about them. She used records from the Civil Aeronautics Administration to gather the data.

Although structure and need were not yet firmly established, Jackie seized an opportunity to see her plan in action – through the British Air Transport Auxiliary (ATA), which was actively recruiting women. After returning to the states, she developed a detailed proposal on how the U.S. might duplicate England’s success with female pilots.

In spite of pilot shortages, Lieutenant General Henry H. "Hap" Arnold was the person who needed to be convinced that women pilots were the solution to his staffing problems. Arnold, Chief of the Air Corps, continued as commanding general of the Army Air Forces upon its creation in June 1941. He knew that women were being used successfully in the ATA in England so Arnold suggested that Cochran take a group of qualified female pilots to see how the British were doing. He promised her that no decisions regarding women flying for the USAAF would be made until she returned.

Although General Hap Arnold eventually dismissed the proposal, he later gave Jackie an opportunity to prove that American women could handle the demands of wartime military flying.

With 25 hand-picked female pilots, Jackie returned to England, where she and her girls trained and ferried under the auspices of the ATA. But as Jackie refined and expanded the role of women in wartime support, another American aviatrix was proposing a ferrying plan of her own.

When Jackie arrived home in 1943 she was livid to discover that Nancy Harkness Love had been tasked with training women for the ferrying division of the Army Air Forces. The new program was called the Women’s Auxiliary Ferrying Squadron (WAFS).

Unable to bear the idea of someone else shepherding “her” vision, Jackie mounted a campaign pressing the military to revisit her original proposal, which included military training and a variety of aviation roles above and beyond ferrying.In the end, the WAFS were absorbed into the WASPs (Women’s Airforce Service Pilots), under the leadership of…Jackie Cochran.

She was, and would forever be, a force to be reckoned with. Volatile, emotional, sensitive, stubborn, relentless and always, always fascinating, Jackie Cochran would have to wait until 1977 to see her hard-won WASPs gain true military status.

Lobbying Arnold for expanded flying opportunities for female pilots, he sanctioned the creation of the Women's Flying Training Detachment (WFTD), headed by Cochran. In August 1943, the WAFS and the WFTD merged to create the Women Airforce Service Pilots (WASP) with Cochran as director and Nancy Love as head of the ferrying division.

As director of the WASP, Cochran supervised the training of hundreds of women pilots at the former Avenger Field in Sweetwater, Texas from August 1943 to December 1944.

For her wartime service, she received the Distinguished Service Medal (DSM) in 1945. Her award of the DSM was announced in a War Department press release dated March 1, 1945 which stated that Cochran was one of the the first woman civilians to receive the DSM, which was then the highest non-combat award presented by the United States government.

At war's end, Cochran was hired by a magazine to report on global postwar events. In this role, she witnessed Japanese General Tomoyuki Yamashita's surrender in the Philippines and was then the first non-Japanese woman to enter Japan after the War and attended the Nuremberg Trials in Germany.

Cochran began flying the new jet aircraft, setting numerous records. She became the first woman pilot to "go supersonic".

On September 9, 1948, Cochran joined the U.S. Air Force Reserve as a lieutenant colonel. She was promoted to colonel in 1969 and retired in 1970. She was, quite probably, the first woman pilot in the United States Air Force.

Cochran was also the first woman to land and take off from an aircraft carrier, the first woman to pilot a bomber across the North Atlantic (in 1941) and later to fly a jet aircraft on a transatlantic flight, the first woman to make a blind (instrument) landing, the only woman ever to be president of the Fédération Aéronautique Internationale (1958–1961), the first woman to fly a fixed-wing, jet aircraft across the Atlantic, the first pilot to fly above 20,000 feet with an oxygen mask, and the first woman to enter the Bendix Transcontinental Race. She still holds more distance and speed records than any pilot living or dead, male or female.

In 1952, Cochran, at age 47, decided to challenge the world speed record for women, then held by Jacqueline Auriol. She tried to borrow an F-86 from the U.S. Air Force, but was refused. She was introduced to an Air Vice-Marshal of the Royal Canadian Air Force who, with the permission of the Canadian Minister of Defence, arranged for her to borrow “19200,”the sole Sabre 3. Canadair sent a 16-man support team to California for the attempt. On 18 May 1953, Cochran set a new 100 km speed record of 652.5 mph. Later, on June 3rd, she set a new 15 km closed circuit record of 670 mph.

Encouraged by then-Major Chuck Yeager, with whom Cochran shared a lifelong friendship, on May 18, 1953, at Rogers Dry Lake, California, Cochran flew the Sabre 3 at an average speed of 652.337 mph. During the course of this run, the Sabre went supersonic, and Cochran became the first woman to break the sound barrier.

Because of her interest in all forms of aviation, Cochran flew the Goodyear Blimp in the early 1960s with Goodyear Blimp Captain R. W. Crosier in Akron, Ohio.

Among her many record accomplishments, from August to October 1961, as a consultant to Northrop Corporation, Cochran set a series of speed, distance and altitude records while flying a Northrop T-38A-30-NO Talon supersonic trainer. On the final day of the record series, she set two Fédération Aéronautique Internationale world records, taking the T-38 to a peak altitude of 56,072.835 feet.

During her career in the Air Force Reserve, she received three awards of the Distinguished Flying Cross for various achievements from 1947 to 1964.

When Jackie Cochran published her 1953 autobiography, “The Stars At Noon,” its cover sported a mosaic portrait featuring Jackie as a young girl at the center, flanked by photos of the grown Jackie in a variety of poses and personas. Her husband, Floyd Odlum, observed that the cover art went beyond graphic design and into the realm of psychoanalysis. “It’s the little girl, surrounded by some of the women she made herself into in her lifetime,” he noted.

Although Jackie’s ultimate success in life was surely aided greatly by her marriage to a man of wealth and influence, her determination to leave poverty began years before fate seated her next to the wealthy Floyd Odlum at a Miami dinner party.

Sometimes called the "Speed Queen", at the time of her death, no other pilot held more speed, distance, or altitude records in aviation history than Cochran.

“We all accepted Jackie. But it wasn’t because she wasn’t feminine when she wanted to be. She could be very soft, very feminine,” said Air Force Major General Fred Ascani. “Some women resented Jackie. Why? … Where the men were talking war stories, that’s where Jackie Cochran would be. I think at times she was somewhat wistful that she wasn’t able to have better associations with women. But, obviously, it would have taken a lot of time away from the things she wanted to do. She was always so busy. She even drove her cars like fast planes. She played so many roles well. She could be very, very feminine and she could be very hard and critical.”

In the 1960s, Cochran was a sponsor of the Mercury 13 program, an early effort to test the ability of women to be astronauts. Thirteen women pilots passed the same preliminary tests as the male astronauts of the Mercury program before the program was cancelled. It was never a NASA initiative, though it was spearheaded by two members of the NASA Life Sciences Committee, one of whom, William Randolph Lovelace II, was a close friend of Cochran and her husband. Though Cochran initially supported the program, she was later responsible for delaying further phases of testing, and letters from her to members of the Navy and NASA expressing concern over whether the program was to be run properly and in accordance with NASA goals may have significantly contributed to the eventual cancellation of the program. It is generally accepted that Cochran turned against the program out of concern that she would no longer be the most prominent female aviator.

Helen LeMay, wife of Air Force General Curtis LeMay was one of Jackie’s few female confidants. She valued her friendship with Jackie precisely because “Jackie wasn’t a woman who had many close female friends. I remember how she used to drive like the wind…and insist on doing it. We had a lot of fun together, even when she was creating a crisis a minute…which was something she’d do all the time!”

Senator Stuart Symington once noted that he had never met anyone as competitive as Jackie. “She was right there up front. Tremendously competitive. She had to win, but that’s what made her so great.” And yet Jackie was equally comfortable with her feminine side, as Symington discovered at their first meeting.

“I had heard about her…I had anticipated a tomboy, so when she walked in I was surprised. Attractive and very well dressed, she was obviously proud of her physique. She could be a seducer,” he recalled. “Years later when we were closer friends, she said to me ‘Senator, the first time we met, you were looking at my legs.’ I guess I was. We laughed about it.”

In the meantime, she continued to rack up records and achievements that included convincing Dwight Eisenhower to run for office, rescuing Lyndon Johnson from death, becoming the first woman to fly a jet across the Atlantic, and being the first living woman enshrined in the National Aviation Hall of Fame.

A lifelong Republican, Cochran, as a result of her involvement in politics and the military, became close friends with General Dwight Eisenhower. In the early part of 1952, she and her husband helped sponsor a large rally at Madison Square Garden in New York City in support of an Eisenhower presidential candidacy.

The rally was documented on film and Cochran personally flew it to France for a special showing at Eisenhower's headquarters. Her efforts proved a major factor in convincing Eisenhower to run for President of the United States in 1952 and she played a major role in his successful campaign. Close friends thereafter, Eisenhower frequently visited her and her husband at their California ranch and after leaving office, wrote portions of his memoirs there.

Politically ambitious, Cochran ran for Congress in 1956 from California's 29th Congressional District as the candidate of the Republican Party. Her name appeared throughout the campaign and on the ballot as Jacqueline Cochran-Odlum. Although she defeated a field of five male opponents to win the Republican nomination, in the general election she lost a close election to Democratic candidate and first Asian-American congressman Dalip Singh Saund. Saund won with 54,989 votes (51.5%) to Cochran's 51,690 votes (48.5%). Her political setback was one of the few failures she ever experienced and she never attempted another run. Those who knew Cochran have said that the loss bothered her for the rest of her life.

Despite her lack of formal education, Cochran had a quick mind and an affinity for business and her investment in the cosmetics field proved a lucrative one. Later, in 1951, the Boston Chamber of Commerce voted her one of the 25 outstanding businesswomen in America. In 1953 and 1954, the Associated Press named her "Woman of the Year in Business".

Cochran served on the Board of Trustees for the George Washington University from 1962 until her passing in 1980.

Blessed by fame and wealth, Cochran donated a great deal of time and money to charitable works.

On July 17, 1962, Representative Victor Anfuso (D-NY) convened public hearings before a special Subcommittee of the House Committee on Science and Astronautics to determine whether or not the exclusion of women from the astronaut program was discriminatory, during which John Glenn and Scott Carpenter testified against admitting women to the astronaut program. Cochran herself argued against bringing women into the space program, saying that time was of the essence, and moving forward as planned was the only way to beat the Soviets in the Space Race.

None of the women who had passed the tests were military jet test pilots, nor did they have engineering degrees, which were the two basic experiential qualifications for potential astronauts. Women were not allowed to be military jet test pilots at that time. On average, however, they all had more flight experience than the male astronauts.

"NASA required all astronauts to be graduates of military jet test piloting programs and have engineering degrees. In 1962, no women could meet these requirements." This ended the Mercury 13 program. However, John Glenn and Scott Carpenter, who were part of the Mercury 7, also did not have engineering degrees when they were selected. Both of them were granted a degree after their flights for NASA.

Significantly, the hearings investigated the possibility of gender discrimination a two full years before the Civil Rights Act of 1964 made that illegal, making these hearings a marker of how ideas about women's rights permeated political discourse even before they were enshrined in law.

Ultimately, the barefoot girl from the backwoods of Florida and Georgia flew higher, faster, and farther than she ever dreamed possible. And when she died in 1980, she held more speed, altitude and distance records than anyone in the world…male or female.

“Jackie was an irresistible force…Generous, egotistical, compassionate, sensitive, aggressive – indeed an explosive study in contradictions – Jackie was consistent only in the overflowing energy with which she attacked the challenge of being alive.

Cochran died on August 9, 1980 at her home in Indio, California that she shared with her husband until he had died four years prior.

Cochran's aviation accomplishments never gained the continuing media attention given those of Amelia Earhart. Also, Cochran's use of her husband's immense wealth had the effect of diminishing her rags-to-riches story. Nonetheless, she deserves a place in the ranks of famous women aviators and as a woman who frequently used her influence to advance the cause of women in aviation.

She was a long-time resident of the Coachella Valley and is buried in Coachella Valley Public Cemetery. She regularly utilized Thermal Airport over the course of her long aviation career. The airport, which had been renamed Desert Resorts Regional, was again renamed Jacqueline Cochran Regional Airport in her honor.