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Mary 'Wally' Funk
- American Aviator
- Born: February 1, 1939
- Best Known For: Her miriad of accomplishments in the fields of Aviation and Space
Wally's Story
Mary Wallace Funk was born in 1939. She grew up in Taos, New Mexico, riding her bike or her horse, skiing, hunting and fishing. When she was 14, the National Rifle Association sent her incredible shooting results to the president, Dwight Eisenhower, and he wrote back to her. “I did everything that people didn’t expect a girl to do,” she says. “There was nothing I couldn’t do.”
Funk didn’t give the idea of space much thought, but she wanted to fly. By the time she was seven, she was making planes from balsa wood. At nine, she had her first flying lesson. She remembers “the air and how pretty it was, and how the ground looked. It was probably all of 15 minutes.”
She didn’t fly again until her teens, when she enrolled at Stephens College in Missouri and got her flying license. She went on to study education at Oklahoma State University, mainly because it had an aviation team known as “the flying Aggies.” “As a Flying Aggie, I could do all the maneuvers as well as the boys, if not better,” she says. After that, she became a flight instructor – the only female one – at a US military base.
Then Funk read an article about the Woman in Space Program, run by William Randolph Lovelace. A doctor who had worked on Project Mercury, Nasa’s drive to put a man into orbit around the Earth, Lovelace launched this privately funded program to discover if women were as able as men. Funk contacted him, detailing her experience and achievements. Despite being underage – the women were supposed to be between 25 and 40; she was 22 – she was invited to take part.
Funk and 12 other women – who became known as the Mercury 13 – passed and were put forward for the next phase of testing. But then the program, which was not sanctioned by Nasa, was cancelled after doubts were raised about whether women should even be taking part in such a thing.
Funk continued working as a flight instructor and later became the first female investigator for the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA), looking into plane crashes.
(The above information is an excerpt from the Guardian Article on Funk, from 2019.)
On July 1, 2021, Jeffrey Bezos shared a video of him telling Funk that she would be the third member of the Blue Origin crew as an “honored guest.” He added that he and his crew “can confirm in her training here, that she’s still outperforming all of the men, and she can out-run all of us.” Finally able to see the Earth from the perspective she had dreamed about 60 years ago, on July 20, 2021, she made history again, taking the record of most senior person in space.
Articles To Read
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Los Angeles Times
Videos To Watch
A few of Wally's Achievements...
Funk rated first in her class of 24 fliers.
Funk left high school early at the age of 16 and entered Stephens College in Columbia, Missouri. Funk became a member of the "Flying Susies."
Funk earned a large number of aviation certificates and ratings:
Funk moved on to complete a Bachelor of Science degree in Secondary Education at Oklahoma State University, drawn there primarily by their famous "Flying Aggies" program. Her certificates include: Commercial, Single-engine Land, Multi-engine Land, Single-engine Sea, Instrument, Flight Instructor's, and all Ground Instructor's ratings.
Funk was elected as an officer of the "Flying Aggies" and flew for them in the International Collegiate Air Meets. She received the "Outstanding Female Pilot" trophy, the "Flying Aggie Top Pilot" and the "Alfred Alder Memorial Trophy" two years in succession.
1961: Youngest participant in a program to test whether the US’s best female pilots could become astronauts
In 1964, her work in aviation was recognized when she became the youngest woman in the history of Stephen's College to receive the Alumna Achievement Award.
Her first job was at Fort Sill, Oklahoma, as a Civilian Flight Instructor of noncommissioned and commissioned officers of the United States Army.
Funk was the first female flight instructor at a US military base.
In 1971, Funk earned the rating of flight inspector from the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA), becoming the first woman to complete the FAA's General Aviation Operations Inspector Academy course.
She worked for four years with the FAA as a field examiner, the first woman to do so. In 1973 she was promoted to FAA SWAP (Systems Worthiness Analysis Program) as a specialist, the first woman in the United States to hold this position.
In 1974, Funk was hired by the National Transportation Safety Board (NTSB) as its first female Air Safety Investigator.
Funk has been chief pilot for five aviation schools across the country. To date, as a professional Flight Instructor she has soloed more than 700 students and put through 3,000 Private, Commercial, Multi-engine, Seaplane, Glider, Instrument, CFI, Al, and Air Transport Pilots.[
On July 1, 2021, Blue Origin announced Funk would fly on the first New Shepard flight.
After the successful flight on July 20, 2021, aged 82, she became the oldest person to fly to space, exceeding John Glenn's record at the age of 77 in 1998.
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