Evelyn Pinckert "Pinky" Brier, who was widely regarded as the first licensed female flight instructor in the United States and who owned and ran a private airport in San Bernardino for 40 years, has died. She was 98.
Brier, who also flew noncombat missions during World War II as a member of the Women Airforce Service Pilots, died Jan. 20 of pneumonia at Redlands Community Hospital in Redlands, Calif., said her niece Victoria Pinckert Rafa.
She learned to fly from a co-worker at the Southern California Gas Co. in the 1930s and then married her instructor, Air Force pilot Joe Brier, in 1939. The same year, she became the first woman to receive an airplane instructor's license under the newly established Civil Air Authority, according to an Air Force history of women in aviation.
"I was the only one in this area licensed to teach aerobatics, which I loved," Brier told the Riverside Press-Enterprise in 2001.
The couple operated San Bernardino's Tri-City Airport, which was about 10 years old when Joe Brier bought it in 1938, and ran a flying school. For years they lived in a hangar at the airport that also served Redlands and Colton. They never had children.
"I thought a town that didn't have an airport wasn't much of a town," Evelyn Brier said in the Press-Enterprise in 2003. "Flying was difficult to sell in those days."
She did her part to promote it by landing her plane in the middle of Redlands Boulevard on May 19, 1938, to mark the advent of airmail in Redlands. She reportedly tied up traffic for hours.
With her husband serving in the military during World War II, Brier joined the WASP program and ferried warplanes to air bases within the United States.
She "relished the opportunity to fly military aircraft," including B-17s, and trained military pilots, said Wilfrid C. Lemann, her attorney and longtime friend.
In the 2002 book "The Powder Puff Derby of 1929," author Gene Nora Jessen wrote that the Briers' "busy, grass strip airport . . . exemplified the heart and soul of aviation's postwar development in the U.S.
"Pinky flew charter, and Joe kept the airplanes under repair -- a man with a magical ear for a sick engine. Pinky advertised that she would fly anywhere at any time, and she did," Jessen recalled.
Long before commuter airlines were commonplace, Brier flew three short hops a day from Tri-City to Los Angeles International Airport.
