A former Iowan will soon be out with her third volume of the state’s aviation history. An author and pilot who once lived in Iowa will soon be out with a third volume of the state’s aviation history. Ann Pellegrino says she’s been flying for more than forty years. She says as a kid she built models, and went to Chicago’s Midway airport to watch the planes, and after she was married they joined a flying club with a grass runway, learned to fly, bought a plane and eventually bought and restored others. While they still make up only five-percent of pilots, Pellegrino says there are more opportunities now with women flying airliners, combat helicopters, and space missions. In 1967 with a crew of three, she re-traced the historic round-the-world flight of Amelia Earhart 30 years earlier. She’d quit teaching english and was flying charter trips and teaching aviation, so she and the three others just got together and made the trip. Volume 1 goes from the first unmanned balloon ascension in 1845 to the end of WW1, her second book picked up with the barnstormers and continued through the second world war and “golden age of aviation,” and in the upcoming volume she’ll go all the way to 2003 and add a final chapter of historic fiction. Pellegrino says her third volume won’t be out till next year. Inducted into the Iowa Aviation Hall of Fame in 1990 and the Iowa Women’s Hall of Fame in 2001, Pellegrino now lives in Texas.
