Hazel Ying Lee

Hazel Ying Lee (born August 24, 1912, Portland, Oregon, U.S.—died November 25, 1944, Great Falls, Montana) was a Chinese American pilot who flew for the U.S. military in the Women Airforce Service Pilots (WASP) program during World War II. She was one of the first Chinese American women in the country to receive a pilot’s license. Along with other WASP members, she was posthumously awarded a Congressional Gold Medal in 2009.

Early life and introduction to flying

Lee was the second of eight children born to Yuet Lee and Ssiu Lan Wong, first-generation Chinese Americans who met and married in the United States after immigrating from Guangdong to escape ongoing political conflicts. She was raised in Portland, Oregon, where her parents owned a Chinese restaurant in the city’s Chinatown.

Lee was an athletic, adventurous girl who was involved in many sports. She even earned a driver’s license as a teenager, which was not common for young women at the time. Lee graduated from Commerce High School (later Cleveland High School) in 1930 at the age of 17. When she was 19 years old, she accompanied a friend on his flight lesson and became enamored with aviation. Wanting to learn how to fly herself, she found a job as an elevator operator (one of the few jobs that Chinese American women could get at the time) at the Liebes department store in downtown Portland to help pay for her lessons. After securing a sponsorship from the Portland Chinese Benevolent Society, she enrolled at the Chinese Flying Club of Portland and began flying while still a teenager. She earned her pilot’s license in October 1932, becoming one of the first Chinese American women to do so.

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Flying career and the WASP program

In 1933 Lee left the United States with hopes of joining the Chinese Air Force in opposition to the Japanese invasion of Manchuria, but it did not allow female pilots. Disappointed but wanting to stay to support China, she took a military desk job and occasionally flew for a commercial airline. She applied to the Chinese Air Force for a second time in July 1937, when the Second Sino-Japanese War began, but was turned down again for the same reason. During that time Lee helped her friends and neighbors secure shelter during airstrikes, saving the lives of many. She also survived the bombing of Guangzhou and was briefly a refugee in Hong Kong.

Lee returned to the United States in 1938 and worked to supply aid and armaments to the Chinese army. In 1942 she applied and was accepted to the Women’s Flying Training Detachment (WFTD), which merged with the Women’s Auxiliary Ferrying Squadron (WAFS) in 1943 to become the Women Airforce Service Pilots (WASP) program under the command of Jackie Cochran.

In February 1943 Lee began a six-month training program along with 151 other trainees at Avenger Field near Sweetwater, Texas, in the program’s fourth class, 43-W-4; she was one of 112 trainees who successfully graduated from the program. She learned to fly various military planes and quickly rose to the top of her class, and she enjoyed mentoring younger pilots and teaching fellow trainees about her culture. During training Lee exhibited fearlessness when she fell out of a plane, parachuted to safety, and calmly walked back to the camp to the shock and delight of everyone. She graduated from the training program on August 7, 1943. She also married Clifford Yin Cheung Louie in this period; Louie was a Chinese American pilot whom she met during pilot training in Portland and who later flew as a major in the Chinese Air Force. Lee was also known for her humor, once recounting an incident wherein she was a victim of racial prejudice: She was forced to land her plane in a Kansas field and was chased by a farmer, who assumed she was a Japanese invader until she managed to convince him otherwise.

Lee was stationed in Michigan at the then-Air Transport Command’s Romulus Army Air Field. A member of the 3rd Ferrying Squadron, she flew ferrying and administrative flights in Boeing-Stearman PT-17s and North American T-6 Texans, as well as the Boeing C-47, a cargo plane that could transport up to 6,000 pounds.

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In September 1944 Lee was selected for an intensive training program at the army’s pursuit school in Brownsville, Texas. There she learned to fly high-powered, single-engine fighter aircraft, including the North American P-51 Mustang, the Bell P-63 Kingcobra, and the Republic P-47 Thunderbolt.

Death, posthumous recognition, and legacy

Not long after, on November 23, 1944, she was ferrying a Bell P-63 Kingcobra from Niagara Falls, New York, to Great Falls, Montana. Although she was cleared to land, weather delays had caused a large number of P-63s to approach the airport at the same time, creating confusion in the control tower. Mixed signals received by Lee and another pilot caused their planes to collide and burst into flames. Lee survived the wreckage but succumbed to her burn injuries, dying two days later.

During the same week, Lee’s family learned that her younger brother Victor had died while serving in the U.S. Army in France; the two are buried next to each other in Portland. Lee was only 32 years old when she died, and she was the last of 38 WASPs to die in service before the program was deactivated in December 1944. Because the WASPs were classified as civilians, Lee did not receive a military funeral. It was only in 1977 that the U.S. Congress granted the WASPs military status.

In 2003 the PBS documentary A Brief Flight: Hazel Ying Lee and the Women Who Flew Pursuit, which pays tribute to Lee and other WASPs, was released. Lee was inducted into the Oregon Aviation Hall of Honor in 2004 for her service, bravery, and contributions to aviation. She and other WASP members were collectively awarded a Congressional Gold Medal in 2009.