Valerie Andrea was 10 years old in 1932, when a congratulatory bouquet, she saluted the hero Aviation Marce Hills at the Strasbourg Airfield in France.
She was already determined to become a doctor, at which time a career round for a young woman. But when she presented flowers in front of Ms Hills, she was so warmly welcomed, who completed the record -breaking round trip flight between Paris and Sagan, that she had another strong purpose. Associated: He decided to become a pilot of the aircraft.
Valerie Andre not only pursued both professions. She rose to them. She became a mental surgeon, a parachuteist and a helicopter pilot, which is said to be the first woman to fly a rescue mission for any military force. She was also the first French woman who was nominated a general and was the winner of Crooks de Gary’s five -time winner for bravery in Indocuena and Algeria.
Dr. Andrea passed away January 21 in the suburbs of Paris in Isa-Lis Molino. She was 102.
“All of this began with the dream of a 10 -year -old girl, who is flying like a star,” French Defense Ministry spokesman Olivia Panchu said. “He worked with a commitment to ensure that the armed forces closed openly like a fighter pilot for women’s characteristics.”
The announcement did not say that if the families of the family were left survived.
In the early 1950s, 120 combat missions in the dense forests and Sogi Rice Pedges of Indocaeen, where French Communist was trying to repel the guerrillas, Dr. Andrei gave 168 wounded soldiers to Hanoi hospitals in the battlefield. Blower – including enemy soldiers, when there were rooms on two dirt on the helicopter on its single -seat Huller helicopter.
He later flown 365 missions in the North African war, where Algerian people wanted independence from France. In 1976 she was promoted as General, the first woman was appointed in the French army.
But when his bravery was celebrated at home and he wrote two memories in French, his achievements were not so famous abroad – at least recently.
He was a documentary of 2021, “Madam Le Genor,” and a book of English language, “Helicopter Heronian: Valerie Andre-Surgency, Panier Rescue Pilot, and Fire,” Charles Morgan Evans , An aviation, historian, published in 2023.
Valerie Colin Andrea was born on April 21, 1922, in Strasbourg in the Alliance region of northeastern France near the German border. His father taught music at a boys’ high school. Her mother encouraged her four daughters to get the same opportunities for higher education that were available to her five sons.
Dr. Andrea will promote this agenda throughout his career.
“I noticed that every woman has the possibility of choosing her life, even if this choice needs more rigor than a man.”
When he decided to include his emotions for both medicines and aviation, he tested the lessons that fly students in French and mathematics. When she was 16 years old, she received her pilot’s license.
Two years later, in 1940, the Germans attacked. She fled Al-Aisi-first southwestern France, where the University of Strasbourg was abolished, and then the Nazi-occupied Paris, where she continued her education in Sorbon.
While most women studying in France at the time were included in children’s patients, femininity or public health, it increased the number of neurological sciences. She received a medical degree in 1948, when she was 26 years old.
“At the end of my medical education, the Dean of the Faculty of Medicine told us that the army did not have enough doctors in Indocuena,” Dr. Andrea told Aviation Magazine. Vertical In 2017. He advised that he should join the army.
While working as a surgeon, he observed a helicopter demonstration in Sagan in early 1950 and appealed to his top officers who would be better than parachutes from the helicopter from the fighter zone to hospitals. , What he did, so that they could be treated on the ground. Later, he told the Smithsania News Service that when the soldiers were surprised when they saw “a girl, of everything, falls from the sky.”
She returned to France for preliminary training, received further training in Vietnam this October, and then began ordering her first Medivic helicopter flights in early 1952.
According to the National Air and Space Museum of the Smithsonian Institution, she was one of the first 12 women in the world to receive a helicopter pilot ranking and the first woman to fly the helicopter to the war areas.
In 1953, she returned to France, after surviving the accident, where she set up a medical unit at the military helicopter. In 1957, she was stationed in Algeria, where she logged hundreds of rescue missions before she came home in 1962.
As a military physician general and a member of the Presidential Commission, he uncertainly lobbying for women to play a more active role in the army. She retired in 1981 as Inspector General Medicine.
Before she went to the retirement house in Isa-Lis Molnox, which is near the Paris Hailey Port, Dr. Andrea lived near the upper floor of a six-storey building.
He said, “I wanted a lot of sky.
Because she was a Patelite woman – her weight was less than 100 pounds – her helicopter with the Red Cross Infeniace can adjust the stretcher on each skid. Before she flew, she was trained by Air Force Colonel, Alexis Santini. In 1963, he married her.
Well before his death in 1997, he surpassed it.
