AOPA Pilot Magazine - October 2021 - 112

PILOTS
Wally Funk
Dreams really do come true
BY JULIE SUMMERS WALKER
LOGBOOK /
WHO Wally Funk, oldest
person to fly to space
HOURS 19,600-plus hours
AIRCR AFT She has owned
a Cessna 150, 172, and a
182, and a Stearman that
she instructed in, throwing
her leg out on the wing so
she could lean in to talk to
her student. " The tower
would say, 'Wally, stay in
the airplane.' "
EXTRA Funk is
an accomplished
outdoorswoman. " I didn't
do dolls, " she says. " I was
an outside kid all of my life;
my mother gave me the
freedom to do things. "
YOU MAY HAVE heard about this: 82-year-old Wally Funk of
Grapevine, Texas, became the oldest person to fly to space. Funk
accompanied Jeff Bezos, his brother Mark, and 18-year-old private
pilot Oliver Daemen in Bezos' Blue Origin New Shepard rocket
on July 20, 2021. " My brain is still up there, " she said nearly one
month after her historic flight. " I want to go back. "
Funk is not sure how Bezos discovered her, nor who convinced
him to invite her on his first trip to space, but the
experience, she said, was out of this world. " Jeff and Blue Origin
were absolutely fabulous to me; can't say enough about him, " she
said, explaining that the preparation and training took several
days in West Texas. She stayed in a well-appointed trailer on
the site and her instructor took her through four days of ground
school, guiding her through unbuckling the four straps of her belt
to release into anti-gravity and re-buckling for the return from
space. The three minutes spent tumbling around in no gravity is
something she'd done before.
" I've done a lot of astronaut training through the world, "
she said. " I could always beat the guys on what they were
doing, because I was always stronger. " Funk was a member of
the iconic all-female Mercury 13. Those women trained-and
accomplished-all the requirements for astronauts in the 1960s,
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AOPA PILOT / October 2021
but NASA balked and women were not considered for the space
program until 1978. Funk, who excelled in the Women in Space
program in 1961, was the youngest in the class at 21 (she also
scored better than John Glenn on some of the tests).
She graduated from Stephens College in 1958 and was a
member of the " Flying Susies. " At Oklahoma State University
she was a member of the Flying Aggies and won the Outstanding
Female Pilot trophy. She was the first female flight instructor at
Fort Sill, a U.S. military base; she was the first female FAA flight
examiner; the first female FAA Systems Worthiness Analysis
Program specialist; and the first female NTSB safety investigator.
She has been a chief flight instructor at five aviation schools
and instructed more than 3,000 pilots.
Blue Origin's New Shepard has flown 16 flights into space, but
this was the first with passengers. The 62-mile ride flew at three
times the speed of sound and took just 10 minutes, 10 seconds.
" We were in space for three minutes doing acrobatics, tumbles,
but the kid [Daemen] had long legs and I didn't want to get hit by
his legs, " she said. The rocket landed in a puff of dust in Texas, and
Funk exited the capsule with her arms spread wide, saying she was
ready to go again. " It was the greatest experience I've ever had, and
I've had a lot of wonderful experiences. " julie.walker@aopa.org
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