WWII-era pilot Violet Cowden dies at 94

Violet Cowden never lost her love of flying, a passion born when she was a young girl envying the hawks soaring above her family's South Dakota farm in the 1920s.

When she was a young first-grade teacher learning to fly out of an airfield in Spearfish, S.D., in the early 1940s, her students always knew when she had been flying because she was so happy.

Her love of flying only increased when she joined the Women Airforce Service Pilots (WASP) during World War II. And although her career as a pilot ended after her wartime service, her enthusiasm for flying never let up.

Indeed, Cowden gleefully co-piloted a World War II-era P-51 Mustang with dual controls and flew from San Bernardino to Orange County, both in California, last year when she was 93.

As she put it in a 2010 documentary about her life in the sky: "I always say the worst thing about flying is coming back to earth. That's the hardest thing for me. I would stay up, I would -- but you do run out of gas."

Cowden, a former president of the WASP veterans organization whose experiences and indomitable spirit inspired later generations of female pilots, died April 10 of congestive heart failure at Hoag Memorial Hospital Presbyterian in Newport Beach, Calif., said her daughter, Kim Ruiz. She was 94.

Cowden was 26 when she earned her WASP silver wings in 1943.

"I joined because of love for the country," she told the Los Angeles Times in 1993, "and I thought maybe I could contribute something to the war effort."

As civilian pilots under contract to the military, the WASP fliers freed up male pilots for combat missions.

Cowden flew 19 types of aircraft, including fighters. The P-51 Mustang was her favorite, she said in the 1993 Los Angeles Times interview.

Once, she recalled, she got a P-51 up to more than 400 mph when she raced a Navy pilot from Columbus, Ohio, to Newark, N.J. "I just stayed ahead of him all the way," she said.

In addition to her daughter, she is survived by two sisters, Betty Niese and Lillian Riede; and three grandchildren. Cowden's husband, Scott, died in 2009.