Wally Funk: Determined to Fly

Wally Funk is probably best known for being one of the Mercury 13, in 1960, and for going into space, in 2021. She was a trailblazer and goodwill ambassador for aviation and air safety her entire adult life, and taught literally thousands of pilots. 

She was born Mary Wallace Funk II on February 1, 1939, in Las Vegas, New Mexico, and her mother was her biggest champion and cheerleader. Wally learned to fly at a young age, and on October 28, 1958, she joined The Ninety-Nines, Inc. International Organization of Women Pilots, which changed her life forever. 

A woman pilot named Jerrie Cobb pored over the Ninety-Nines membership records at the headquarters in Oklahoma City. Jerrie was searching in the most logical place to select experienced women pilots for a highly secret program, the weeklong examination of female astronaut candidates. By then, Wally had graduated college and was a commercial pilot and civilian flight instructor at a military air base. She immediately offered herself for testing. 

Wally became the youngest of the First Lady Astronaut Trainees, later known as the Mercury 13 for the number of women pilots who passed the same rigorous physical and mental testing of male astronaut candidates. Among other feats of strength and stamina, Wally set the record for staying in a sensory deprivation tank without hallucinating or freaking out — over 10 hours.

The secret program was abruptly halted in 1961. Wally subsequently applied to NASA but was denied multiple times. She also applied to the airlines, but they had not hired a single woman pilot, and they didn’t hire her. 

In 1968, Wally became the 58th woman in the U.S. to earn the highest pilot certificate, Airline Transport Pilot. In 1971, she was hired as the Federal Aviation Administration’s first woman aviation safety inspector. Four years later, she became the National Transportation Safety Board’s first woman aviation accident investigator. Her entire career was devoted to flight instruction and air safety. And all along, she was doggedly determined to fly into space; in this, she never wavered. 

I knew nothing of Wally or her achievements when, on a sunny summer day in 1986, I flew a twin Cessna on a passenger charter from Albuquerque to Taos, New Mexico. As I was locking up the plane and contemplating how to pass the hours at the airport, a car pulled up on the ramp. A woman with a giant smile stuck her head out the window and shouted, “ARE YOU THE PILOT?  COME TO BREAKFAST WITH US!” And that’s how I met Wally Funk and her then flight student LouAnne Gibson. Having just finished a flight lesson, they took me for banana pancakes at Michael’s Kitchen in downtown Taos, then to Wally’s spacious adobe home filled with artwork by famous local artists.

Anyone who has met Wally recognizes this scene: Her brilliant smile, exuberance, and eagerness to take you under her wing. From that day forward, Wally made herself my friend and mentor — and I was just one of many mentees.

Like the best of mentors, Wally could be as tough as she was encouraging. She would tell you flat-out what you were doing wrong and what you needed to be doing better. These critiques could sting – Hard Truths, I call them – but the salve was that Wally knew what she was talking about, and she had your best interests at heart. When you passed a checkride, advanced to a better flying job, or upgraded to a bigger airplane, Wally would cheer loudly for you. She genuinely celebrated every woman pilot who reached an important milestone – milestones she had aspired to herself, but was kept from achieving due to having been born a woman and too soon.

But she never gave up. Over the decades, she undertook a series of training courses for astronaut aspirants, at her own expense. She tapped into every private space program under development, was among the first to pay Sir Richard Branson for a seat on his Virgin Galactic spacecraft. She published her memoir “Higher Faster Longer: My Life and My Quest for Spaceflight” in 2020. 

These longtime efforts brought her name to the attention of a certain Jeff Bezos, who personally invited her to fly into space with him on Blue Origin's New Shepard spacecraft. Wally’s flight into space on July 20, 2021, was the culmination of her life’s dream, the result of her lifelong persistence and effort. She was 82.

That wasn’t her only dream of flight. Years earlier, Wally opened up to me in a rare moment of vulnerability. She had moved to the Dallas-Ft. Worth area in 1991, and I later joined a DFW-based airline, so I visited her when coming in for training. On this day, she pulled out a box of mementos and clippings and shared how painful it was to have had so many doors closed to her.

“All I ever wanted was to fly,” Wally said. She would have loved to fly a jet fighter, an airliner, a rocket. But then she went on: “What I really want to do is fly free. No airplane, no machine, nothing. FLY FREE IN SPACE.” 

Wally Funk II died July 8, 2026, in Grapevine, Texas, at age 87. I like to think that she is flying free in space now. 

© 2026 Jenny Beatty. All Rights Reserved. 

Photo courtesy of Jenny Beatty.