This remarkable octogenarian’s life-long passion for aeronautics made her an inspirational teacher and figurehead – as well as a record-breaking astronaut.
Wally’s fascination with flight started early. As a girl, she delighted in building model aircraft and ships, and idolized Amelia Earheart, the pioneering aviator who’d become the first woman to fly across the Atlantic solo seven years before Wally was born.
By the age of 16, Wally had enrolled in Stephens College in Columbia, Missouri, USA, which had a women’s flying club.
When NASA was inaugurated in 1958, it didn’t specifically exclude women from spaceflight training.
But would-be astronauts were required to have served as military jet test pilot – a role only open to men.
Undeterred, Wally sought out what roles she could within the male-dominated aviation industry, while reapplying to NASA to join one of its training programmes.
Four applications; four rejections. She spent nearly a decade working as a flight instructor, all the while applying to airlines for jobs; without exception, she was turned down.
But despite the limitations imposed on her – purely because she was a woman – she pushed on with her career.
She became a flight inspector for the Federal Aviation Administration and the National Transportation Safety Board’s first female air safety investigator, while also managing academic flight-training programmes.
Her achievements didn’t go unrecognized: in 1964, she became the first woman to receive her alma mater Stephens College’s Alumna Achievement Award for her work in aviation.
And the following year, she was recognized as one of the “Outstanding Young Women of America”.
She went on to teach aeronautical flying at California’s Redondo High School, became a goodwill flying ambassador for three years and take part in numerous air races.
In 1975, Wally beat a field of 80 competitors to win the Pacific Air Race from San Diego, California, to Santa Rosa.
In what proved to be a stellar year, she was also invited to the White House for lunch – at the behest of Betty Ford, wife of the then-US President – and was made an Honorary Colonel by the Governor of Louisiana.