Black
Aviation

Charles Terres Weymann

Won the Gordon Bennett Cup

Port-au-Prince, Haiti

Born in Port-au-Prince on 2 August 1889 to an American father and a Haitian mother, Cornelie Miot. Flying a 100-horsepower Nieuport, he took the third Gordon Bennett Cup at Eastchurch in July 1911, twenty-five laps of a six kilometre course at an average of seventy-eight miles an hour, and won it for the United States. He flew as a test pilot for Nieuport through the First World War, and later invented the flexible Weymann body used on early luxury cars. Haiti counts him as its first aviator.

• →Bessie Coleman (1921)

Ahmet Ali Çelikten

First Black military pilot

Yeşilköy, Ottoman Empire

Born in Izmir in 1883. His maternal grandmother had been brought to Turkey from Bornu, in what is now Nigeria. He began cadet training at the Naval Flight School at Yeşilköy in 1914 and graduated on 11 November 1916, months before Eugene Bullard earned his wings in France. He flew in the First World War and again in Turkey's War of Independence. He is widely regarded as the first Black military pilot in history, and is almost unknown outside Turkey.

• →months apart, on opposite sides of a war. Eugene Bullard (1917)

Eugene Bullard

First African American military pilot

Lafayette Flying Corps, France

Born in Columbus, Georgia. Flew with the Lafayette Flying Corps in the First World War and became the first African American military pilot. When the United States entered the war and took over American volunteer pilots, it took every one of them except him.

William Robinson Clarke

First Black military pilot in British service

Jamaica and the Royal Flying Corps

Born in Kingston, he paid his own passage to England in 1915. He flew reconnaissance over the Western Front from May 1917 until he was shot down that July while photographing German positions. He survived, and served on.

• →Johnny Smythe (1943)

Bessie Coleman

First African American woman to hold a pilot licence

Le Crotoy, France

Every flight school in America refused her. So she learned French, sailed to the Caudron Brothers' school at Le Crotoy, and took her licence from the Fédération Aéronautique Internationale on 15 June 1921. She was the first African American woman and the first Native American woman to hold one. It took her seven months.

• →one hundred and five years. Victor J. Glover (2026)

James Herman Banning

First African American to fly across the continent

Banning and Thomas Allen flew coast to coast. They financed the trip as they went by asking people to sign the aircraft's wing for a contribution. They named themselves.

John C. Robinson

Commander, Imperial Ethiopian Air Force

Addis Ababa, Ethiopia

A Chicago aviator, invited by Haile Selassie in April 1935 and named commander of the Imperial Ethiopian Air Force that August. He trained Ethiopian pilots, flew reconnaissance and carried men and supplies to the front against Mussolini's invasion. Back home he persuaded his old school, Tuskegee Institute, to open a school of aviation. He is also remembered as a father of Ethiopian Airlines.

• →he helped start the airline she would captain. Captain Amsale Gualu (2015)
• →he persuaded Tuskegee to open its flight school. Tuskegee Army Air Field opens (1941)

Cornelius Coffey · Willa Brown

First Black-owned flight school in the United States

The Coffey School of Aeronautics opened at Harlem Airport in Oak Lawn, Illinois. It was the first flight school in the United States owned and operated by African Americans. Of seven Black-operated schools funded under the federal Civilian Pilot Training Programme, Coffey was the only one not attached to a college. Coffey was chief instructor and maintained every aircraft himself. Willa Brown ran it, and trained more than two hundred Tuskegee airmen and instructors. A recruiting poster called her what she was: maker of pilots.

• →trained the pilots the Army would not. Tuskegee Army Air Field opens (1941)
• →the same institutional form, sixty-three years on. Major General John H. Bailey II (2001)
• →teaching the next ones to fly. Roxane Romulus (2020)

National Airmen's Association of America founded

Coffey, Brown and Enoch Waters founded the National Airmen's Association of America to force Black aviators into military flight training. Within two years the Army Air Corps opened Tuskegee.

• →organised until the door opened. Tuskegee Army Air Field opens (1941)

Benjamin O. Davis Sr.

First African American general officer

Promoted to brigadier general in the United States Army, forty-two years into his service.

Tuskegee Army Air Field opens

The 99th Pursuit Squadron begins training at Tuskegee Army Air Field. It was created under the segregation it was meant to prove wrong, and staffed in part by pilots the Coffey School had already trained.

• →Benjamin O. Davis Jr. (1943)
• →Daniel "Chappie" James Jr. (1975)

Oscar W. Holmes Jr.

First African American air traffic controller

New York airway traffic control centre

He trained as a pilot and then took a post with the Civil Aeronautics Administration in 1941, as an assistant controller in New York at eighteen hundred dollars a year. He was very light-skinned, and the Navy commissioned him as an aviator without knowing he was Black. The FAA's own history of him is titled: he broke three colour barriers, but few knew. He said he never set out to be a pioneer and only wanted a career in aviation.

Benjamin O. Davis Jr.

332nd Fighter Group, the Red Tails

Italy and southern Europe

Davis commanded the 99th, then the 332nd Fighter Group, escorting bombers over Europe. He would become the first Black general in the United States Air Force. President Clinton advanced him to four-star general on 9 December 1998.

• →Charles B. Hall (1943)
• →Freeman Field. One hundred and one officers arrested (1945)
• →the best gunners in the Air Force. Winners of the first Air Force gunnery meet (1949)

Charles B. Hall

First aerial victory by a Tuskegee Airman

On 2 July 1943, escorting B-25s over Castelvetrano in Sicily, Hall put his P-40 between the bombers and two Focke-Wulf 190s, turned inside them, and shot one down. It was his eighth mission, the first aerial victory by any Tuskegee Airman, and the only one they scored in all of 1943. He shot down three more before the war ended.

• →Lee Archer (1944)

Johnny Smythe

RAF navigator, twenty-six missions and two years a prisoner of war

Sierra Leone and Stalag Luft I

A navigator from Freetown, chosen for the work on the strength of his mathematics. He navigated twenty-six bombing runs over Germany and was shot down on the twenty-seventh, spending the rest of the war in Stalag Luft I until the Russians freed it in 1945. In 1948 he sailed as the senior officer aboard the Empire Windrush.

• →Squadron Leader Ulric Cross (1944)

Flight Lieutenant Billy Strachan

RAF bomber crew, thirty operations over Germany

Kingston, Jamaica

He sold what he had and crossed U-boat waters at his own expense to enlist. He flew thirty night raids over Germany as a wireless operator and air gunner, against a bomber crew average of about seven. The desk job he had earned was offered and refused. He retrained as a pilot instead, flew solo after seven hours, and finished the war a Flight Lieutenant.

• →Squadron Leader Ulric Cross (1944)

Lee Archer

Four aerial victories

One on 18 July 1944, then three in a single day on 12 October. Archer was one of three Tuskegee Airmen credited with four aerial victories. The group finished the war with one hundred and twelve.

• →Roscoe C. Brown (1945)

Squadron Leader Ulric Cross

RAF Pathfinder navigator, eighty operations. DSO and DFC

Trinidad and RAF Marham, England

Born in Port of Spain in 1917, he reached Britain in November 1941 and trained as a navigator. He flew with 139 (Jamaica) Squadron and was chosen for the Pathfinder Force, which marked targets ahead of the bombers. He took the DFC in June 1944 and the DSO the year after, for exceptional navigational ability, and declined the rest he was offered. He is thought to be the most decorated West Indian of the war. He later became a High Court judge in Trinidad.

• →Caribbean aircrew in the Royal Air Force (1944)

Caribbean aircrew in the Royal Air Force

The Caribbean and Britain

Around four hundred and fifty West Indians served as RAF aircrew in the Second World War, and several thousand more on the ground. They came from Trinidad, Jamaica, Guyana, Barbados and across the region, to fight for a country most of them had never seen.

Freeman Field. One hundred and one officers arrested

On 5 April 1945, officers of the 477th Bombardment Group entered a whites-only officers' club at Freeman Field, Indiana. One hundred and one were arrested and charged under the 64th Article of War. The Army Air Forces then persuaded the War Department to prohibit racial segregation of base facilities outright. They were arrested for it, and they won.

• →arrested for it, and won. Executive Order 9981 desegregates the armed forces (1948)

The 332nd photographed at Ramitelli

Ramitelli, Italy

Toni Frissell photographed the 332nd at their airfield in Italy: briefings, the parachute room, the officers' club in the evening. The Library of Congress holds the negatives. They are among the finest aviation photographs ever made, and they are why this history can be seen rather than only described.

Roscoe C. Brown

Me 262 downed from a P-51 Mustang

On 24 March 1945, flying a P-51 over Berlin, Brown shot down a Messerschmitt Me 262, one of the first operational jet fighters. He was not the first American to down a 262, a claim often repeated on his behalf, but he did it in a piston-engined Mustang against an aircraft roughly a hundred miles an hour faster. He commanded the 100th Fighter Squadron.

Executive Order 9981 desegregates the armed forces

Truman ordered equality of treatment and opportunity across the armed services. Three years after Freeman Field.

Winners of the first Air Force gunnery meet

In May 1949 the Air Force held its first Fighter Gunnery Meet over the desert at Las Vegas Air Force Base, now Nellis. Captain Alva Temple and Lieutenants Harry Stewart and James H. Harvey III, flying P-47N Thunderbolts for the 332nd, won it. The silver cup carrying the winners' names then disappeared for fifty-five years. The historian Zellie Rainey Orr found it in 2005, in storage at the National Museum of the Air Force. Nellis unveiled a plaque on 11 January 2022.

Jesse L. Brown

First African American naval aviator

Chosin Reservoir, Korea

Shot down over the Chosin Reservoir in December 1950 and trapped in the wreckage. Thomas Hudner crash-landed his own aircraft alongside, deliberately, trying to free him. He could not. Hudner received the Medal of Honor.

Perry H. Young Jr.

First African American pilot at a scheduled US airline

Hired by New York Airways to fly helicopters, eight years before any major passenger carrier would hire a Black pilot.

Ed Dwight

First African American astronaut candidate

President Kennedy backed him as America's first Black astronaut candidate. He completed the Aerospace Research Pilot School course that carried white officers into the astronaut corps. NASA never selected him. He left the Air Force without flying, and became a sculptor.

• ⇢sixty-three years. Ed Dwight (2024)

Marlon Green

Supreme Court ends airline hiring discrimination

Continental had an opening. Green was a qualified Air Force pilot. They gave the seat to a less experienced white applicant. On 22 April 1963 the Supreme Court ruled unanimously in Colorado Anti-Discrimination Commission v. Continental Air Lines, 372 U.S. 714. He flew for Continental from 1965 to 1978.

• →forced the door. David E. Harris (1964)

David E. Harris

First African American pilot at a major US airline

American Airlines hired him the year after the Green decision. The door Green forced open, Harris walked through.

Melody Millicent Danquah

Ghana's first woman pilot

Ghana

She flew solo for the first time on 22 June 1964 and took her wings on 15 April 1965, one of the earliest women to fly anywhere in Africa. She was among the first three women accepted into the Ghana Air Force.

• →Captain Alexis Ajavon (1976)

Robert H. Lawrence Jr.

First African American selected as an astronaut

Selected on 30 June 1967 for the Air Force's Manned Orbiting Laboratory. He was the first African American chosen as an astronaut by any national programme. On 8 December 1967 he was instructing from the back seat of an F-104 at Edwards when the student flared too late. The student ejected and lived. Lawrence's seat fired as the aircraft rolled and burned. The Air Force did not officially count him as an astronaut. His name was added to the Space Mirror Memorial in 1997, thirty years on.

• ⇢selected, and never flown. Mandla Maseko (2013)
• →Guion Bluford (1983)

Eleanor Joyce Toliver-Williams

First Black woman certified as an FAA controller

Anchorage ARTCC, Alaska

Certified at Anchorage Air Route Traffic Control Centre in 1971. In 1994 she became the first African American woman to head a major en-route facility, at Cleveland Centre in Oberlin, Ohio.

Daniel "Chappie" James Jr.

First African American four-star general

Tuskegee-trained. Flew fighters in Korea and Vietnam. Took his fourth star in 1975.

• →military flying fed the astronaut corps. Robert H. Lawrence Jr. (1967)

Captain Alexis Ajavon

First African captain on a long-haul airliner

Air Afrique, Togo

Trained at Saint-Yan in France on a Togolese scholarship and joined Air Afrique at the end of 1962. He qualified on the Beech 18 in 1965, the DC-3 in January 1967 and the DC-4 that September, and took command in 1976, the first African captain of a long-haul DC-8. By 1974 he had eight thousand hours, and flew Eyadéma of Togo, Houphouët-Boigny of Côte d'Ivoire and Bongo of Gabon.

• →Captain Chinyere Kalu (1981)

Organization of Black Aerospace Professionals founded

O'Hare Hilton, Chicago

Ben Thomas, a young Eastern Airlines pilot, invited thirty-seven Black pilots to meet in Chicago on 17 and 18 September 1976. What they founded has argued for equity in hiring, training and advancement across aviation ever since, and put a great many people through flight training who would not otherwise have got there.

Lt. Cmdr. Brenda E. Robinson

First Black woman to earn Navy Wings of Gold

NAS Corpus Christi

In 1977 she was one of ten women chosen nationwide for Aviation Officer Candidate School at Pensacola. She took her wings on 6 June 1980, the fifty-ninth woman to enter the programme and the forty-second to finish it. In January 1981 she qualified for C-1A carrier landings aboard USS America, the second woman ever to land on a carrier. Her call sign was Raven. She flew thirteen years active, seven in the reserves, then seventeen for American Airlines.

James R. Rodgers Sr.

First Black executive director of a US commercial airport

Little Rock Regional Airport

Appointed in 1980 at Little Rock. He ran more than seventy million dollars of expansion and brought Southwest Airlines to the field. Running an airport is its own profession, and he was the first Black person to hold the top job at a commercial one.

Captain Chinyere Kalu

First Nigerian woman to hold a commercial pilot licence

Zaria, Nigeria

She enrolled at the Nigerian College of Aviation Technology in Zaria and took her commercial pilot's licence on 20 May 1981, the first Nigerian woman to hold one. She went on to run the college that trained her, as Rector and Chief Executive from 2011 to 2014.

• →Captain Adine Ossebi (1998)

Guion Bluford

First African American in space

STS-8, 30 August 1983, the shuttle programme's first night launch and night landing. Sixty-two years after Bessie Coleman had to sail to France for a licence.

Ronald McNair

Mission specialist, Challenger

Flew on STS-41-B in 1984. Lost aboard Challenger on 28 January 1986, seventy-three seconds after launch.

Frederick D. Gregory

First African American to pilot and to command a shuttle

Piloted STS-51-B in 1985 and commanded STS-33 in 1989. He later served as Deputy Administrator of NASA.

Dr. Walt W. Braithwaite

Took aircraft design off paper

Kingston, Jamaica and Boeing, Seattle

Born in Kingston in 1945, he joined Boeing in 1966 as an associate tool engineer. Over nearly four decades he moved aerospace design from drafting tables to computers, built the CAD/CAM Integrated Information Network, and helped write the Initial Graphics Exchange Specification that let different manufacturers exchange digital designs at all. The Boeing 777 was the first airliner designed entirely on computer, largely on the strength of his work.

• →design left paper before flight left the pilot. Dr. Charles R. Glass (2022)

Mae Jemison

First African American woman in space

STS-47, 12 September 1992. A physician and engineer who served in the Peace Corps in West Africa before NASA. She carried a poster from the Alvin Ailey company with her, and a statue from West Africa.

Patrice Clarke Washington

First Black woman captain at a major US carrier

Captain at UPS, seventy-three years after Bessie Coleman was told no by every school in the country.

Bernard A. Harris Jr.

First African American to walk in space

STS-63. Outside the airlock, in a suit, in orbit.

Captain Adine Ossebi

First woman to command an Air Afrique aircraft

Air Afrique, Congo

African pilots had commanded Air Afrique aircraft since the 1960s. It took until 1998 for a woman to do it.

• →Captain Irene Koki Mutungi (2004)

Major General John H. Bailey II

Institute Founder

Commissioned an Ordnance Officer out of Officer Candidate School on 10 May 1967. Germany from 1962 to 1965. Two tours in Vietnam: platoon leader and company commander with the 101st Airborne, then Army Fixed Wing Aviator with the First Aviation Brigade, flying reconnaissance, surveillance and search-and-destroy missions over South Vietnam, Laos and Cambodia. He finished his service as Commanding General of the Texas State Guard. In 2001 he founded the John Bailey Institute, a 501(c)(3), to put young people into aviation careers. He serves now as Founder and Executive Director Emeritus.

• →Dr. Charles R. Glass (2022)

Michael P. Anderson

Payload commander, Columbia

Lost on re-entry, 1 February 2003.

Captain Irene Koki Mutungi

First African woman to captain a commercial airliner

Nairobi, Kenya

She qualified to captain a Boeing 737 for Kenya Airways in 2004, the first woman on the continent to command a commercial aircraft. She later became the first African woman certified as a captain of the Boeing 787 Dreamliner.

• →Captain Amsale Gualu (2015)

Mandla Maseko

First Black African selected to fly to space

Pretoria, South Africa

One of twenty-three chosen from a million entrants in 2013 to fly to space, and the first Black African selected. He trained at the Kennedy Space Center in 2015. He was a candidate officer in the South African Air Force and a part-time DJ. He was killed in a motorcycle crash on 6 July 2019, aged thirty, before the flight ever came.

Captain Amsale Gualu

First all-female crew in African aviation

Addis Ababa to Bangkok

She became the first female captain in Ethiopian aviation in 2010, on a Q-400 from Addis Ababa to Gondar and Axum. On 18 November 2015 she commanded the first all-female crew flight in African aviation, from Addis Ababa to Bangkok. Pilots, cabin crew and ground staff were all women.

Part 107 opens commercial flight to anyone who passes a test

United States

On 29 August 2016 the FAA's small unmanned aircraft rule took effect. For the first time, flying commercially did not require an aircraft, a medical certificate or a hundred hours of instruction. It required a written exam and a certificate. The cost of entry to professional aviation fell further in one day than it had in the previous century.

• →Monica and Mavis Gragg (2019)
• →the certificate the institute now teaches. Dr. Charles R. Glass (2022)

Monica and Mavis Gragg

Co-founders, Black Women Drone

United States

Two sisters who set out to close the gap in a field that was barely five years old and already lopsided. As of June 2021 about six point seven per cent of FAA-registered drone pilots were women. They built a project to bring Black women and girls into that number.

• →Roxane Romulus (2020)

Major Mandisa Mfeka

South Africa's first Black woman combat pilot

South African Air Force

She joined the South African Air Force in 2008, went to the Central Flying School at Langebaan in 2010 and took her wings in 2011. In May 2019 she flew in the formation over the presidential inauguration, the country's first Black female combat fighter pilot.

Roxane Romulus

Founder, Black Girl Drone World

Atlanta, Georgia

An aviator with twenty-five years in the industry mentored her for a year. She co-founded a drone production company in Atlanta, taught as an assistant in its FAA Part 107 certification classes, then took the certificate herself, one of few women of colour holding a commercial drone licence. She founded Black Girl Drone World to train girls and women of colour aged eight to twenty-four, and wrote a guide for them.

• →Dr. Charles R. Glass (2022)

Charles McGee

Four hundred and nine combat missions across three wars

Across the Second World War, Korea and Vietnam. One of the highest three-war totals of any American fighter pilot. Promoted to brigadier general in 2020, at 100.

Sian Proctor

First Black woman to pilot a spacecraft

Inspiration4, the first orbital flight crewed entirely by non-professional astronauts. She is a geoscientist and community-college professor.

Dr. Charles R. Glass

Executive Director, John Bailey Institute

Eagle Scout, Navy officer, Eastern Airlines pilot, commercial drone pilot and university professor holding an Airline Transport Pilot certificate. He has carried research funding from the Office of Naval Research, the Texas Department of Transportation, the Transportation Research Board, the US Coast Guard and the Department of Education, all of it aimed at recruiting and graduating students into STEM careers. More than four hundred people from his community now work as aviation professionals around the world. In 2022 he became Executive Director of the John Bailey Institute.

Jessica Watkins

First Black woman on a long-duration ISS mission

Crew-4, 2022. She worked on the Curiosity rover before she flew.

Ed Dwight

Reached space in 2024, aged ninety

On 19 May 2024 Ed Dwight flew to space aboard New Shepard, aged 90. He became the oldest person ever to do it. Stepping out of the capsule, he put both arms over his head.

Victor J. Glover

Pilot, Artemis II. First Black astronaut to fly to the Moon

Lunar orbit

Artemis II launched 1 April 2026 and came home on 10 April. Glover flew as pilot and became the first Black astronaut to fly to the Moon. One hundred and five years after Bessie Coleman was refused a licence in her own country.