Betty Skelton, a pioneer in both aviation and auto racing who was once known as the fastest woman on Earth, has died at the age of 85.
Half a century ago she was setting speed records on the sands of Daytona Beach and Utah’s Bonneville salt flats. She was a three-time national aerobatic champion when she became the auto industry’s first female test driver in 1954 and soon began cracking women’s land speed records, taking her Corvette to 145.044 mph at Daytona in 1956, and a jet-powered machine to 315.72 mph at Bonneville in 1965.
Skelton first began gaining widespread attention as a teenaged stunt pilot in the early 1940s, and once told the Associated Press that, “To me, there’s hardly any feeling in the world that can equal the feeling of an airplane when the wheels leave the ground.” Her most famous trick was to use her plane‘s propeller to cut a ribbon strung between two poles while flying upside down, just a few feet off the ground.
In the ’50s, she raced across South America’s Andes Mountains, down Mexico’s rugged Baja Peninsula and also set records at the Chrysler proving grounds in Michigan. “I would venture to say there is no other woman in the world with all the attributes of this woman,” NASCAR founder Bill France once remarked. “The most impressive of them all is her surprising and outstanding ever-present femininity, even when tackling a man’s job.”
She continued to fly planes until her mid-70s, and her everyday driver remained a red Corvette. In 2008 she was inducted into the Motorsports Hall of Fame of America in Novi, Michigan. She is survived by her husband, Allan Erde.
