The history of aviation is not just the history of aircraft. It is the history of the people who fought their way into the sky against every obstacle that stood between them and the horizon. The third week of June belongs entirely to three women who were told, in one way or another, that aviation wasn't for them — and who went anyway.

We start on June 15th, 1921, in a small coastal town in northern France, where a twenty-nine-year-old woman from Waxahachie, Texas walked out of a flight school and into history. Bessie Coleman had been turned away by every American flight school she applied to — because she was a woman, because she was Black, or both. So she learned French, crossed an ocean, and earned her international pilot's license in France. She came home a barnstormer, used her visibility to fight segregation, and spent the rest of her short life saving money to build a flight school for Black Americans. The school she never got to build cast a long shadow — one that reaches all the way to the Tuskegee Airmen.

Then June 17th, 1928, and a red-and-gold Fokker trimotor called Friendship lifting off from Newfoundland with Amelia Earhart aboard. She wasn't flying the airplane that day — and she knew it. Her own word for her role on the crossing was "cargo." The discomfort she felt about the glory that followed drove her for the next four years, until she climbed into a Lockheed Vega alone and crossed the Atlantic on her own terms. The 1928 flight matters not for what she did, but for what she refused to let herself get away with not doing afterward.

And finally, June 21st, 1913, at Griffith Park in Los Angeles, where a four-foot-eight carnival performer named Tiny Broadwick became one of the first people ever to parachute from a powered aircraft. The following year, demonstrating for the Army in San Diego, she made a split-second decision that detached her from her static line and sent her into free fall — and the improvised hand-pull that brought her parachute open became the foundation for every ripcord that has ever saved a pilot's life.

Three women. One week. All of aviation changed.

Windows of Flight is brought to you by the Border Series — aviation thriller novels by host Eric Ristau. Old bold pilots, vintage aircraft, and plots ripped straight from today's headlines. Find the Border Series wherever books are sold, and learn more at www.ericristau.com.