“I’ve been waiting a long time to finally get up there,” she said after the historic flight.
Born Mary Wallace Funk in Las Vegas, New Mexico, she grew up in Taos and began her aviation journey by jumping from a barn wearing a superhero cape at age five.
She dropped out of high school at 16 when barred from mechanical drawing classes, subsequently enrolling at Stephens College to study aviation.
Funk later attended Oklahoma State University, competed with the Flying Aggies aviation team, and went on to train more than 800 pilots at her flight school in Taos.
She was elected to the Women in Aviation International Pioneer Hall of Fame in 1995 and was added to the National Air and Space Museum's Wall of Honor in 2017.
“Nothing has ever gotten in my way,” she said. “They said ‘well you’re a girl, you can’t do that.’
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I said ‘guess what, doesn’t matter what you are, you can still do it if you want to do it.’”
