WASHINGTON (CNN) -- From the time she was about 8 years old, Jane Tedeschi wanted to fly.
Jane Tedeschi when she was in the Women Airforce Service Pilot program.
"[Charles] Lindbergh was flying across the Atlantic, and a lot of other people were flying air races and things like that. It was very romantic," she said.
Flight was still relatively new in the 1920s and 1930s, and female pilots were few.
But Tedeschi was determined.
In 1941, she found a childhood friend who taught flying and started taking lessons. After the friend was sent off to war and the airport near her home in Bethesda, Maryland, was closed to private flying, she traveled about 40 miles to Frederick and spent nights on the floor of a farmhouse to continue her lessons.
Around the same time, Deanie Parrish was working in a bank in Avon Park, Florida, and kept seeing aviation students who were attending a flying school there.
"I asked an instructor 'Why can't I learn to fly,' and he didn't have an answer...so I decided to find out for myself."
