The “only one in the world” is what the Los Angeles Times said about Bessie Coleman a century ago. It launched me on a quest to trace the breathtaking moxie of an adventurous, brave, Black woman who’d been born the daughter of an enslaved woman, and who would ascend to fly aeroplanes before most Americans had ever seen one in the sky, earning her the moniker Queen Bess.

I am a Boeing 737 captain for United Airlines. I stand on the shoulders of Bessie Coleman, and I became obsessed with her extraordinary ride from Texas labourer to world-famous pioneer aviator largely because her miraculous story seemed hidden in plain sight for nearly 100 years.

Coleman stood at the nexus of the dawn of aviation, as well as the dawn of the Great Migration. Moving to Chicago from Texas in 1915, Coleman

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