Appalachian Figures
At the entrance to Morristown Regional Airport in East Tennessee, a bronze bust of a woman with neatly waved hair greets visitors. The plaque beneath it reads “Evelyn Bryan Johnson” and “Mama Bird.” Behind that nickname sits one of the most remarkable aviation careers in American history.
Over a lifetime that stretched from 1909 to 2012, Evelyn Stone Bryan Johnson logged more than 57,600 hours in the air, an estimated five and a half million miles. By the time glaucoma and age finally grounded her in 2006, she had trained more than five thousand student pilots and given over nine thousand Federal Aviation Administration check rides, more than any other pilot on record.
For national aviation writers, she was a record setting flight instructor. For the Civil Air Patrol, she was a colonel and founding force in the Morristown squadron. For Appalachia, she was something else as well. She was a Corbin, Kentucky born schoolteacher who turned a small town dry cleaning business and an advertisement that said “Learn to fly” into a second life among the clouds.
Today her scrapbooks, logbooks, photographs, and correspondence rest in the Archives of Appalachia at East Tennessee State University, where the exhibit “Mama Bird – First Lady of Flight” draws on the Evelyn Bryan Johnson Papers, 1930–2002, to tell her story as part of regional history.
What follows is an Appalachian biography of “Mama Bird,” built first from those near primary sources and official records, then from the rich secondary literature that grew up around her.
From Corbin to Etowah
Evelyn Stone was born on November 4, 1909, in Corbin, Kentucky, an L and N railroad town in the Cumberland Plateau. Later genealogical work and local history writing place her in Corbin with her parents in the 1910 census, living in rented housing typical of small railroad communities where families moved as work demanded.
A Tennessee Senate resolution honoring her aviation career states that she was “raised in Corbin, Kentucky and Etowah, Tennessee,” a reminder that her childhood already crossed the Kentucky Tennessee line that defines so many Appalachian lives. Etowah was another rail town, laid out by the Louisville and Nashville Railroad in the early twentieth century. There Evelyn attended school, absorbed the rhythms of trains and small town life, and followed a path that pointed not toward airplanes but toward classrooms.
In 1929 she graduated from Tennessee Wesleyan College in Athens. For at least two years she taught sixth grade in Etowah, working in an era when teaching was one of the few professional roles readily open to Appalachian women who could get beyond high school.
By the early 1930s she had also spent time at the University of Tennessee in Knoxville, where she met W. J. “Wyatt” Bryan. They married in 1931 and settled in Jefferson City, east of Knoxville, on the rolling edge of the Ridge and Valley. There they opened a dry cleaning business known as College Cleaners, serving nearby Carson Newman College and the town around it.
At that point nothing in her life suggested a future in aviation. She was a teacher, a business owner, a wife in a small Tennessee town. Her aviation story began not with barnstormers or war service but with the boredom of waiting for her husband to come home from the Second World War.
Teaching, a Dry Cleaner, and a Wartime Advertisement
When the United States entered World War II, W. J. Bryan entered the Army Air Forces. Evelyn stayed in Jefferson City, running the dry cleaning shop and looking after home and business.
Sometime in 1944 she noticed a small advertisement that read “Learn to fly.” The Carnegie Hero Fund’s obituary for her, based on earlier Associated Press reporting, quotes her memory of what came next. She said, “It was love at first flight, and I have been flying ever since.”
Her first lessons took place at Island Airport near Knoxville. According to Tennessee legislative records and later aviation profiles, she soloed on November 8, 1944, at age thirty four, relatively late for a student pilot. She earned a private pilot’s license in 1945 and, determined to make aviation more than a hobby, obtained her commercial license in 1946. By 1947 she had qualified as a flight instructor.
What stands out in early interviews is that she never described herself as a daredevil. Rather, she spoke like a teacher who had finally found the subject she loved most. In a long profile for AVweb, Joe Godfrey noted that she had always wanted to teach and that instructing in airplanes felt like a natural extension of the classroom.
As flying became central to her life, she stepped more and more away from the dry cleaning business. The Tennessee General Assembly’s resolution notes that she eventually sold College Cleaners in order to devote herself fully to aviation.
Morristown Flying Service and a Mountain Airport
In 1949 Evelyn bought half interest in Morristown Flying Service at the municipal airport in Morristown, Tennessee, further east along the valley. This was a modest field serving a small city, not a major commercial hub. Runways stretched out toward the low ridges, and the work mixed flight instruction, charter flying, and the constant chores of keeping an airfield running.
By 1962 she had bought out her partner and become full owner and airport manager. The Women in Aviation International biography emphasizes that she juggled several roles at once. She was owner, manager, chief flight instructor, and, increasingly, a designated FAA examiner, the person who gave student pilots their final check rides.
For Appalachian communities, small airports like Morristown’s were part of a mid twentieth century effort to plug hill towns into national networks. Her later service on the Tennessee Aeronautics Commission, where she advocated for improvements to rural airports, grew out of years spent watching how a well run local field could serve farmers, factories, and traveling families alike.
Students and visiting pilots remembered Morristown Regional less as an institution than as her personal domain. Writers who visited in the 1990s and early 2000s describe a tidy office full of scrapbooks, plaques, and photographs, with “Mama Bird” herself perched behind the desk, always ready to talk students through weather decisions or checkride nerves.
Helicopters, Civil Air Patrol, and a Rescue on the Runway
Even as she built Morristown Flying Service, Evelyn kept adding ratings. In time she became one of the earliest women in the region to earn a helicopter license, a fact the Whirly Girls International tribute later highlighted.
Her most dramatic public act came on April 28, 1958. That afternoon a helicopter carrying pilot John Ryan and utility manager Davis McNiel lifted off from the Morristown airport after refueling. The craft banked sharply, crashed, and tumbled to the runway on its side. The rotor blades continued to strike the ground and fling the helicopter into the air. Fuel spilled from ruptured tanks. Smoke curled from the engine.
According to the Carnegie Hero Fund’s official citation, Evelyn was the only person on duty at the airport. She grabbed a fire extinguisher, ran toward the wreck, and then did something that few onlookers would have attempted. Reaching the side opposite the bouncing main rotor, she set the extinguisher down, crawled beneath the revolving blade, and leaned into the wreck to shut off the engine. Only then did she spray foam on the engine compartment and help others pull Ryan to safety.
McNiel died from his injuries, but Ryan survived after a long hospitalization. The Carnegie commission eventually awarded her its bronze medal for heroism, one of many honors that later writers folded into her larger story.
That same mix of coolness and service marked her long association with the Civil Air Patrol. She joined CAP in the late 1940s, rose to the rank of colonel, and helped found and sustain the Morristown squadron. A Civil Air Patrol memorial release at her death praised her helicopter work, search and rescue participation, and decades of training cadets alongside civilian students.
Fifty Years in the Right Seat
If the helicopter rescue made headlines, it was the steady work of instruction that defined Evelyn Bryan Johnson’s life.
In 1952 the Civil Aeronautics Administration, predecessor to the FAA, named her a designated pilot examiner. For the next half century she rode in the right seat with thousands of anxious applicants, from teenagers chasing first solo dreams to seasoned pilots seeking instrument and commercial ratings.
By 1991 she had logged more than fifty thousand hours in the air, a milestone Women in Aviation International credits as the highest total ever recorded for a woman pilot at that time. When she finally stopped flying, the total had risen to 57,635.4 hours, a number repeated in her national obituaries and in Guinness record listings.
A 1999 AOPA Flight Training profile titled “50 Years in the Right Seat” described her typical days at Morristown. Students might start with pattern work or stalls while she watched their hands and feet. On check rides she let silence do much of the teaching, waiting to see how a pilot handled crosswinds, engine out drills, and radio confusion.
Joe Godfrey’s AVweb profile and later AOPA tributes quote a consistent philosophy. She believed in patience, in repetition, and in treating nervous students like family. Many pilots recalled that she was stricter than her grandmotherly appearance suggested. The kindness came from a desire for them to survive bad days, not just pass a test.
Her own words on teaching came through strongly in the oral history preserved by the Experimental Aircraft Association’s “Timeless Voices” project. Speaking to a group of middle schoolers at the Tennessee Museum of Aviation, she urged them to pursue aviation if they wished and to ignore doubters. Sharon Himsl’s blog on pioneer women in aviation, which summarizes that talk, quotes her as telling the kids, “Do not let anybody tell you, you cannot.”
In those years she became a mentor figure for younger women in aviation. Heather Taylor, a pilot who interviewed her on camera in 1997 while working on a film about female air racers, later wrote that visiting “Mama Bird” at Morristown changed the way she thought about her own flying. Taylor remembered Johnson as tiny, direct, and completely unawed by the idea that a woman pilot in East Tennessee had anything to prove to men.
Records, Races, and Late Life Honors
The national press only truly took notice of Evelyn Bryan Johnson once her hours and age reached numbers that made headlines.
She had competed in women’s air races like the Powder Puff Derby in the 1950s, experiences she recounted in interviews and in the book length biography Mama Bird by George Prince. Yet for decades she remained largely a regional figure, known best to Tennessee pilots and Civil Air Patrol circles.
By the 1990s that began to change. Articles in AOPA publications, AVweb profiles, and regional television segments such as WBIR’s “Your Stories: Mama Bird Evelyn Johnson” introduced her to wider audiences as a grandmotherly figure who was still giving check rides in her eighties and nineties.
Recognition followed from professional organizations and halls of fame. Women in Aviation International inducted her into its Pioneer Hall of Fame in 1994. The Kentucky and Tennessee aviation halls of fame added her to their rolls, and she joined the National Flight Instructors Hall of Fame as well.
In 2002 she received the Katharine Wright Memorial Award from the National Aeronautic Association, an honor reserved for those who have made significant contributions to the success of others in aviation. An AOPA briefing item at the time noted that she was still an active examiner and instructor at age ninety two, with more than 57,000 hours logged.
The capstone came in 2007, when the National Aviation Hall of Fame in Dayton, Ohio, inducted her alongside astronaut Sally Ride and adventurer Steve Fossett. By then she had already stopped flying due to glaucoma and a 2006 automobile accident that cost her part of her left leg. She nevertheless learned to walk with a prosthesis and returned to her desk at Morristown Airport, continuing to manage the field.
National obituaries in the Washington Post, New York Times, Los Angeles Times, and Associated Press wires all stressed the same details when she died on May 10, 2012, at age 102. She was born in Corbin, Kentucky. She had logged more hours than any other woman and more check rides than any other examiner. She had flown into her nineties and then kept managing the airport.
“Mama Bird” in the Archives of Appalachia
For historians and family researchers in the region, one of the most important parts of her story sits quietly on shelves in Johnson City.
Women in Aviation International and Wikipedia both note that “Johnson’s scrapbooks, memorabilia, and other papers from the period 1930 to 2002 are housed in the Archives of Appalachia at East Tennessee State University.” The finding aid, compiled by archivist Brianne Johnson, describes the collection as including flight logbooks, personal correspondence, photographs, clippings, awards, and artifacts documenting both her private life and public career.
The Archives’ digital exhibit, “Mama Bird – First Lady of Flight,” curated by Sandy Laws, frames her as “the Amelia Earhart of Morristown, Tennessee” and emphasizes the ways she “paved her own way, on her own terms, and in her own time, through a field dominated by men.”
For Appalachian historians, that exhibit and the underlying papers offer several avenues of inquiry.
They show how a woman born in early twentieth century Corbin navigated changing expectations of women’s work, moving from teaching to business to aviation without leaving the region. They document the textures of rural and small town flying, from log entries of short hops over the Tennessee hills to photographs of Morristown’s runway before it became a regional airport. They trace networks of female pilots, Civil Air Patrol volunteers, and state aviation officials who tied communities across the upper South together in the age of piston engines and small general aviation fields.
The collection also underscores the importance of regional archives in preserving the stories of people who make national records while remaining deeply rooted in local places. To read through her scrapbooks is to see clippings from Knox and Hamblen County newspapers sitting alongside national magazine profiles and hall of fame certificates.
An Appalachian Life in the Air
What makes Evelyn “Mama Bird” Bryan Johnson an Appalachian figure rather than simply an aviation record holder?
Part of the answer lies in geography. She began in the L and N rail yards of Corbin and ended at a small airport in the Ridge and Valley country, rarely venturing far from the hills that ring both towns. When she flew cross country or raced, she returned home to Morristown and to the regional students who kept her hangar busy.
Part lies in class and work. She was not a military test pilot or an airline captain but a teacher and small business owner who built a life from instruction and service. Her hours piled up one lesson at a time, one mountain crosswind at a time, as Appalachian teenagers and factory workers climbed into the right seat beside her.
And part lies in the way she talked about life and death. Heather Taylor’s tribute recalls a passage from George Prince’s biography in which Evelyn reflects on what should happen when she was no longer able to fly. She wanted, she said, “to retire her earthly wings when she is fitted for Heavenly ones. After all, old pilots never die; they just buzz off and fly away.”
That mix of humor, piety, and stubborn independence fits squarely within a long tradition of Appalachian storytelling. It also explains why so many students and colleagues remembered her as “Mama Bird”: a woman whose life suggests that even from a small Kentucky rail town, the sky above the hills can become home.
Sources and Further Reading
Tennessee General Assembly, Senate Resolution 43, “A Resolution to honor and commend Evelyn Bryan Johnson for her remarkable accomplishments in the field of aviation,” 2001.Carnegie Hero Fund Commission
Carnegie Hero Fund Commission, “Evelyn S. Bryan” hero case summary and edited obituary, detailing the 1958 Morristown helicopter rescue, her flight record, and major honors.Carnegie Hero Fund Commission
Archives of Appalachia, East Tennessee State University, Evelyn Bryan Johnson Papers, 1930–2002, and digital exhibit “‘Mama Bird’ – First Lady of Flight – Evelyn Bryan Johnson.”East Tennessee State University+2archivesofappalachia.omeka.net+2
Women in Aviation International, “Evelyn Bryan Johnson,” Pioneer Hall of Fame entry, for chronology of licenses, ownership of Morristown Flying Service, and confirmation of her papers at ETSU.Women in Aviation International
Joe Godfrey, “Evelyn Bryan Johnson,” AVweb profile, September 29, 1999, and AOPA Flight Training features “50 Years in the Right Seat” and “Honoring a legend,” for extended interview material on her teaching philosophy and examiner work.Legacy.com+2AOPA+2
Heather Taylor, “How Mama Bird Gave Me Wings: A Tribute to Aviation Legend Evelyn Bryan Johnson,” Breaking Through the Clouds blog, 2012, for reflections on a 1997 filmed interview and quotations from George Prince’s biography Mama Bird.Breaking Through The Clouds
Sharon Himsl, “J is for Evelyn Bryan Johnson – Pioneer Women in Aviation,” Shells, Tales, and Sails blog, 2016, summarizing the EAA “Timeless Voices” talk and highlighting her role as an early helicopter pilot and mentor.Shells, Tales and Sails
Emily Langer, “Evelyn Bryan Johnson dies; ‘Mama Bird’ was a prolific pilot,” Washington Post, May 13, 2012; Douglas Martin, “Evelyn B. Johnson, Pilot and Instructor, Dies at 102,” New York Times, May 12, 2012; Los Angeles Times obituary “Evelyn Bryan Johnson dies at 102; pioneering female pilot,” May 21, 2012; and Associated Press coverage syndicated via Legacy and other outlets, for national context and confirmation of records and honors.Los Angeles Times+2archivesofappalachia.omeka.net+2
Now WE Know Em, “Mama Bird” biographical post, November 4, 2013, for corroboration of her Corbin birth, Tennessee Wesleyan education, and early teaching career in Etowah.Now We Know Em