During her 20 years of distinguished service to aviation, she totalled 5,000 hours of flight, including 2,000 test flights and trials on more than 140 aeroplanes and helicopters of all types

Jacqueline Auriol was France’s most famous woman aviator and one of the world’s leading military test pilots of the 1950s and 1960s. The daughter of a wealthy shipbuilder, she was born Jacqueline Marie-Thérèse Suzanne Douet on November 5, 1917, in Challans, a small town in France. In 1938, she married Paul Auriol, son of Vincent Auriol who later became President of France from 1947 to 1954. When World War II broke out, Jacqueline refused to leave, but lived in hiding, assisting the French Resistance, and evading Gestapo agents. “I began to realise that I loved danger,” she later recalled.

After the war, Jacqueline took up flying, obtaining her first pilot’s certificate in 1948. One day, she went to meet a famous instructor, Raymond Guillaume, to learn aerobatics. He was sceptical about whether this society lady would be able to withstand harsh aerial manoeuvring. In order to test her, he went far beyond the 10 minutes required for this type of evaluation and flew for an hour through various manoeuvres, including inverted flight. From the corner of his eye he watched her reactions. She smiled back and seemed happy and said she was feeling wonderful. So he continued to train her and became her friend and mentor, imbuing her with a passion for aerobatics. By 1949, she was the only woman in France able to perform aerobatics and the public flocked to see her in action. She took part in a competition flight between Algiers and Dakar and then in July 1949, demonstrated her skills at the Paris Air Show.

A few days later, Auriol was sitting next to the pilot in a twinengine hydroplane, when it crashed into the river Seine. Apart from other injuries, her face was severely hurt, with a torn nose and fractured jaw. Yet, her first question while being rushed to the hospital was, “Will it be long before I can fly again?” The press lamented that the most glamorous woman in Paris would be permanently disfigured. But Jacqueline was determined that this would not happen. Over the next two years, she underwent 22 operations to rebuild her face. Did the experience put her off flying? She once said, “In the case of pilots, it is a little touch of madness that drives us to go beyond all known bounds.” It merely strengthened her resolve to achieve greatness in the air. Between her last two operations in the USA, she earned her helicopter qualification in just four weeks. In 1950, she gained her military licence and qualified at the Flight Test Centre at Bretigny, France, as one of the world’s first women test pilots.

On May 11, 1951, attaining a speed of 508.8 mph in a British Vampire jet, Auriol established a new women’s speed record, besting the earlier mark set by Jacqueline Cochran. This triggered a friendly rivalry between the two Jacquelines, and they went on to swap the women’s world speed record for over a decade. Jacqueline Auriol beat her own record on December 21, 1952, in a Sud-Est Mistral. But she had to settle for being only the second woman to break the sound barrier, on August 3, 1953, months after Jacqueline Cochran. She reclaimed the speed title from Cochran on May 31, 1955, this time in a Mystére IV N.