Stories have been written – and embellished. And an award-winning film has been made by Nick Spark (Producer and Writer) and Amanda Pope (Director), fueled by passion for the subject and, yes, love for the main character, Pancho Barnes, a unique woman, pilot, friend to many, who lived and died during the most tumultuous years of the 20th Century.

If you haven’t yet seen the film, and you love aviation and aviation history in the 20th Century, you need to see it.

Nick Spark: “This is the story of a really powerful woman who accomplished lots of things, on her own terms, in an area dominated by men. But it’s also the story of 20th Century aviation as viewed through the lens of one extraordinary life – the life of Pancho Barnes.”
Pancho Barnes: “Flying makes me feel like a sex maniac in a whorehouse with a stack of $20 bills.”

What was it like to tease out the story of an almost- forgotten aviator (aviatrix in the parlance of the times)? When, as far as anybody knew, very few photos or artifacts remained of her life. How was the movie made? What were the themes?

Nick: “I did not know what this story would be when I began. I didn’t know Pancho’s contemporaries. And I had no idea where it would take me.”

Nick Spark went hunting for the story of Pancho Barnes, the woman who lived from 1901-1975, set and broke air speed records, competed (and won) against Amelia Earhart, Evelyn “Bobbi” Trout and other early women pilots and, after her flying career ended, reinvented herself yet again, and became friend, confidant and trusted advisor to some of the most audacious test pilots and future astronauts of the 1940s and 1950s.

Nick was looking for the real story, not the legend…or the few quotes available… or the nascent photos remaining in yellowing newspaper clippings or microfiche…or the few mentions in Tom Wolfe’s “The Right Stuff.”

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