French Air Force neurosurgeon and pilot Valérie André broke all the rules—and saved hundreds of lives.

The small piston-engine helicopter worked its way around buildings and poles to land at Vietnam’s Tan Son Nhut airfield outside of Saigon. At the controls was a British entrepreneur named Alan Bristow.

It was early 1950, and Bristow was so desperate to show the occupying French forces what his new Hiller helicopter could do for them in Indochina, he had flown into a battle zone to bring back injured Foreign Legion paratroopers.

Among those who enthusiastically greeted the helicopter’s arrival was French air force neurosurgeon Valérie André. She had come to the airport to take charge of treating a soldier suffering a gunshot wound to the skull. André had been alternating her rounds at the Coste Hospital in Saigon by parachuting into remote combat outposts to treat wounded men on location. The Hiller represented a better way.

André was one of the first 12 women in the world to receive a helicopter pilot rating. She would also become the first woman to fly a helicopter into combat zones; the first neurosurgeon-pilot; and the first woman to rise to the rank of general officer in the French armed forces.

As she earned these distinctions, André held her own among her male comrades in arms. Claude Guigues of the Samedi-Soir newspaper wrote about her passing the time with fellow pilots in a ready room at the Gia Lam airfield in 1952, as they waited for the clouds to lift. A vase of gladiolus flowers adorned the table. Guigues described her as wearing gabardine pants and a white blouse. She was “small, very thin,” with a “magnificent mass” of chestnut hair. She chain-smoked Camel cigarettes as the pilots took turns checking the weather forecast and answering the phone. Until the weather cleared, callers were told no rescue flights would be lifting off. Wrote Guigues: “There in the [out]posts, men wait for the helicopter like the Messiah.”

Preparing for takeoff

“Women like Valérie André were innovators and her story inspired me in college, before I even became a pilot,” says Alison Martin, the immediate past president of Whirly Girls, a nonprofit educational and charitable organization dedicated to advancing women in helicopter aviation. “The perseverance of these adventurous women devoted to this obstacle-laden aviation path is remarkable.”

André’s unconventional ways were no surprise to those who knew her as a youngster in Strasbourg, where she repeatedly protested the limits her parents placed on girls in the large family. “I knew very early and very quickly that I would not agree to follow the path in advance that was reserved for girls of my age,” she wrote in her second autobiography, Madame le Général. While a preteen, André had set two goals for herself: to become a doctor and to fly airplanes. She got her pilot’s license when she was 16.

Later, she pursued her medical studies while a fugitive in German-occupied France. In 1948, at age 26, she graduated. Hearing that the French armed forces were short of physicians, André immediately enlisted. She trained as a parachutist so she could be part of elite medical teams that jumped into remote outposts. After treating the wounded, these teams of doctors and nurses—along with armed escorts and patients on stretchers—had to make their way on the ground through enemy territory to French hospitals. Hence André’s keen interest in employing helicopters to move patients to full-care medical facilities without delay.

The machine that caught her eye in Vietnam was the only helicopter in all of Indochina at the time. The helo was there because of a misunderstanding. Hiller salesman Alan Bristow—who would later establish one of the world’s largest civilian helicopter operators—had been told that the French government was going to buy and bestow a helicopter to the puppet ruler of eastern Indochina, Bảo Đại, as a goodwill gesture.

Bristow spent weeks trying to find a French official who would close the deal, before realizing that no such gift was forthcoming. Instead, Bristow shifted his attention to the French armed forces, pitching the Hiller as ideal for medical evacuations. Needing a machine to prove his points, Bristow persuaded the home office to ship a crated Model 360 helicopter from the California factory to Saigon. It was the first of thousands to come—the very model that Valérie André would eventually fly.

The Hiller 360—predecessor to the U.S. military’s H-23 (HTE in Navy service)—was the first production helicopter from a wunderkind named Stanley Hiller. Like the better-known Sikorsky and Bell models, the 360 had a single main rotor for flight and a tail rotor to counter the torque of the main engine. The 360 was less expensive than the competition and quickly gained popularity for an innovative control device Hiller called the Rotor-Matic. Analogous to how trim tabs enable fixed-wing pilots to move heavy ailerons and rudder panels, the Rotor-Matic featured a small pair of stubby, wing-like devices on the rotor hub that the pilot controlled with the cyclic stick. These control paddles adjusted the main rotor blades and, by canceling out unwanted dynamic effects, made the helicopter remarkably stable in flight, even when hovering. If anything, the earliest models were too stable—the helicopter didn’t respond immediately, so pilots could get ahead of their aircraft’s reaction time if they weren’t used to it. “I flew the B and C models in the National Guard,” recalls a pilot in an online message board. ”We used to say that you could put in a cyclic input and eat a sandwich before it took effect.”

Though the 360 lacked the power to rescue people from mountains, at lower elevations it could lift two patients on externally-mounted litters. Finding his military passengers thrilled with the 360 but unable to produce the paperwork to buy any, Bristow reluctantly agreed to risk his own life to undertake medical evacuations from combat zones on behalf of the French Foreign Legion. The Legionnaires supplied him with guns and survival gear, but not fuel, which Bristow had to pay for himself.

On Bristow’s first evacuation mission, he met André. In time, his efforts led to the first helicopter order for the French military, a pair of Hiller 360s. Though André was performing as many as 150 hospital surgeries every month by then, she hadn’t discarded her own plans for serving as a helicopter pilot. In 1950, she won permission to return to France for rotorcraft training.

In October that year, André returned to Indochina. Because helicopters were in such short supply, she would wait 16 months before commanding her own medevac missions.

Meanwhile, she spent much of her off-duty hours at the airfield, waiting for chances to fly. She began accompanying chief pilot Alexis Santini (her future husband) on his evacuations. He taught her what to do if the engine failed: Not only would she have to pull off a successful auto-rotation, she’d need to find ground that was both firm and safe from the enemy. A Hiller flopping into a rice paddy would have to be destroyed in place, since the French had no way to recover it.

Santini also taught his student to leave the helicopter running at idle after touching down to pick up the wounded. More often than not, he explained, the battery-powered starter couldn’t get the Hiller’s engine going again. She learned that radio communications would be difficult, since the Hiller had only a hand-held microphone, and flying through enemy territory required using both hands and both feet.

She learned that whatever medical problems her litter-borne patients might be having en route, there could be no help for them in flight, which at times proved problematic. After André began flying her own missions, one comatose Vietnamese man she picked up at Duoc Pham for transport to Nam Dinh awakened despite his head wounds. Terrified by the surroundings, he tore free of the restraints that kept him in the side litter. He opened the cockpit door and grabbed André’s leg and then her arm. The midair tussle ended only when the man lapsed back into unconsciousness.

A tight spot

Captain André began commanding her first helicopter flights in mid-March 1952. Within a month, she was flying four missions a day. Her early missions startled French troops who had never seen a female pilot—and Vietnamese who had never seen a helicopter. “My bush hat, my glasses, my flightsuit, seem to them an extravagant alien uniform,” she recalled in Madame le Général. In time, dozens of remote outposts came to know her call-sign, Ventilateur, French for “fan.” Keeping excited villagers from getting too close to the spinning blades was a constant worry. Others called her “Mademoiselle Helicopter.”

A flight from the Gia Lam airport in Hanoi to the outpost at Yen Nhan in late November 1952 illustrated another hazard of early medevac flights. André and her fellow pilots had to rely on soldiers at the landing zone to direct them to a sufficiently spacious spot that was free of obstructions (such as houses and trees) that would block a safe climb-out. The soldiers were expected to mark the zone with white panels held down with rocks.

As André approached Yen Nhan, she saw a patch of white on the ground near the riverbank. It was directing her to land at a spot she regarded as “ridiculously narrow,” bounded by walls, wood stakes, and stretches of barbed wire. Seeing no alternative, given that the outpost was surrounded by the enemy, she lowered the Hiller and discovered that the marker was not a set of anchored panels, but rather a silk parachute canopy laid on the ground. The canopy ballooned up and caught in the main and tail rotors. After shutting down and untangling her aircraft, André found that the tail-rotor blades were bent. Knowing the two wounded men waiting for pickup there needed to reach a hospital, she attempted to straighten the metal blades by hand before loading her patients in the litters. But the helicopter vibrated so violently on leaving the ground, she scrubbed the attempt and radioed for one of the larger Sikorskys to bring a mechanic and spare blades.

Meanwhile, the officers at the outpost invited her to share a bottle of champagne. (They were French, after all.) War correspondent Jean Pierre Lucien Osty later observed that André was not only a surgeon and a pilot, she was also a confidante for the outpost-stationed soldiers “cut off from France” by fighting a war the public preferred to forget.

The officers explained over lunch that no one had told them what helicopter pilots required to safely land and take off. Typically, troops assumed that a helicopter could land and launch vertically, like an elevator. In fact, nearly all André’s takeoffs in the tiny Hiller required a diagonal flight path to build lift from forward speed.

Worse, on arrival the mechanic discovered that the new tail-rotor blades didn’t fix the Hiller’s problem: The tail-rotor drive shaft was bent, and no spare was available. So André shifted her patients to the Sikorsky and flew the damaged Hiller back to Hanoi herself, the aircraft shaking all the way.

Madame le Général

More than 2,000 women had served with the French ground forces in Indochina—many were ambulance drivers who routinely risked their lives picking up the wounded in combat zones. But there was no path for women to fly military aircraft in combat. Why then had French forces allowed André to undertake such dangerous medevac missions, rather than have her continue performing brain surgery in Hanoi and Saigon?

For starters, André’s unique combination of expertise proved too valuable to ignore. She had matured into an expert pilot, able to land the Hiller in spaces too small to accommodate larger, more powerful helicopters that were arriving in theater. Plus, she could find her way by memory, using roads, rice fields, and rivers as landmarks. Weighing less than a hundred pounds, André could accommodate larger medevac payloads.

Moreover, upon arriving at the evacuation points, André had the combat-medical skills to triage the injuries. If more men were waiting for evacuation than one sortie could handle, she had the expertise to assess who needed to get to the hospital first. Since the helicopters were not equipped for night flying and the medevac pilots often ran out of daylight, André’s triage evaluations were often life-or-death decisions.

“André had to fill in for the enormous gaps in the French military’s capability in Indochina,” says Roger Connor, a curator in the National Air and Space Museum’s aeronautics department. “The reason they benefited from having pilots as doctors was the same reason they had to give up Indochina—France lacked the resources to simultaneously govern and fight a successful counterinsurgency operation. They were doing it on a shoestring.”

By contrast, during the same period in the Korean War, “there was no need for U.S. pilots to be medically trained as they were a small transport element in a larger and sophisticated patient-care system,” says Connor. “Usually, by the time UN wounded in Korea made it to a helicopter, they had already been stabilized at an aid station, something the French lacked, hence André’s expedient improvisation. In fairness, Korea and Indochina were very different environments, and operating in the bush in southeast Asia was an enormous challenge as we found out a decade later. By the time helicopter medevacs were routine in Korea, the front had stabilized and casualty evacuation was formalized into an efficient and effective process.”

Fortunately for the French, the story of the world’s first female-neurosurgeon-helicopter-pilot was providing prime publicity for their colonial war effort, which needed all the good ink it could get. “Mademoiselle Le Docteur Annoys the Viet Minh,” headlined an article in the New York Times after her 42nd evacuation mission. “She often has been fired upon by the Viet Minh in landing her helicopter on jungle airstrips, or rice fields and limestone hills. But she has always succeeded in picking up and flying back the wounded.”

By late 1952, André’s time in Indochina was coming to an end. The Hillers were close to the 600-hour mandatory heavy-maintenance mark, which would require shipping them to France. André wasn’t in much better shape: She had recovered from an earlier bout with amoebic dysentery, then relapsed.

After completing 129 helicopter missions in which she had evacuated 165 soldiers, André returned to France in January 1953 with a box of medals. She would have to wait for more decorations: The French air force denied her requests to continue flying in Indochina and sent her to the flight-test center at Brétigny-sur-Orge.

After setting up medical facilities at French heliports and training on newer helicopters that had replaced the Hiller 360, André joined a second war in June 1957, this one in Algeria.

By this time, the French were using their powerful helicopters for much more than medical evacuation: The rotorcraft were also employed as airborne command posts and troop transport vehicles and were used for strafing enemy positions. The French had stationed almost 300 helicopters in Algeria when André arrived—mostly Piasecki H-21s and  Bell 47s, along with gas-turbine-powered Alouette IIs and the big Sikorskys.

For the next five years, André took an increasingly active part in the Algerian conflict. Beginning with medical evacuations in Sikorskys and the Alouette II, by 1959 she was living in forward outposts and commanding a Sikorsky H-34, flying hundreds of missions to transport troops into battle zones, following her squadron’s motto, “To Fight and Save.”

André finished her career in the French armed forces, having been named as the first female general officer in 1976. (Newspapers pointed out that she now outranked her husband.) After retiring in 1981, André said that, at last, there was no difference between the opportunities for men and women in the French forces.

Valérie André retired to the top floor of a Paris apartment building—within earshot of the heliport at Issy-les-Moulineaux. Interviewed at age 95 by a reporter for Vertical magazine, she explained, “I wanted a lot of sky.”

James R. Chiles is the author of The God Machine: From Boomerangs to Black Hawks, The Story of the Helicopter (Random House, 2007).