Jackie Moggridge

Jackie Moggridge, born Dolores Theresa Sorour in Pretoria, South Africa, in 1922 and died in 2004, was a pioneering pilot. She learned to fly at fifteen, made the first parachute jump by a woman in South Africa at seventeen, and moved to the United Kingdom in 1938. Recruited to the Air Transport Auxiliary in July 1940, she was the youngest of its women pilots and flew more than 1,500 aircraft of 83 types, for which she received the King's Commendation for Valuable Service in the Air in 1945. After the war she qualified for her Royal Air Force wings in 1953, among the first five women to do so, and ferried Spitfires from Cyprus to Rangoon. In 1958 she was appointed to Channel Airways without stating her sex and became the first British female airline captain to fly passengers on scheduled flights. She won the Jean Lennox Bird Trophy in 1959 and wrote the memoir Woman Pilot, republished as Spitfire Girl.