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WASP pilot and round-the-world air racer
On the record
Margaret Ray was born in Fort Wayne on June 17, 1921. She soloed in 1941, and in 1943 she joined the Women Airforce Service Pilots — class 43-W-5 — ferrying military aircraft for the Army Air Forces. She instructed from 1945, and that August she announced Japan's surrender to her hometown by dropping 56,000 leaflets over downtown Fort Wayne. Then she raced: she flew every Powder Puff Derby from 1957 to 1977 and every Air Race Classic from 1977 on, won the Air Race Classic in 1988, flew the Round-the-World Air Race in 1994 at seventy-two, and a London-to-Sydney race in 2001 at seventy-nine. She logged more than 40,000 flying hours and collected over 150 trophies. Tom Brokaw gave her a chapter of The Greatest Generation, and her autobiography, Girls Can't Be Pilots, appeared in 1998. She raced the Air Race Classic once more at eighty-seven and died in her sleep a month later, on July 28, 2008, at the EAA gathering in Oshkosh, Wisconsin.
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- § 06 — people of the record · famous-people supplement
Sources: Associated Press (obituary, via Legacy); CAF Rise Above, Commemorative Air Force; Indiana Spirit of '45.