Foil: 17 Panel: 1 Column: 2 Line: 8

Wall of Honor Level:
Air and Space Friend

Honored by:
Mr. Henry J. Coyle

Ile was born in Batson, Texas, in January 1920. The youngest of five children of an oil field worker, she moved to San Antonio and worked at Ft. Sam Houston in the early years of WWII. In 1944, she and her small son caught a train to San Diego, California, where she got a job at the Consolidated-Vultee Aircraft Company working on Catalina flying boats. This began a love affair with aircraft that would last a lifetime.
As the war wound down and Consolidated became Convair, Ile worked on such planes as the R-3Y flying boat, the B-36 bomber, the Sea Dart, the F-102 and F-106 fighters as well as many other experimental and production airplanes. During the 1960s, she began working on electronic components associated with the burgeoning aerospace industry. She worked on the Saturn Missile, an integral part of the manned moon mission, and several other spacecraft components.
After her assignment to Lockheed's Skunk Works, where Ile was involved in development of the super-secret F-l 17A Stealth Fighter, she moved to the high desert of Palmdale, California, where she worked on the Space Shuttle Orbiter test project. She was a member of the team assigned to stress test the Orbiter. While in Palmdale, lie also worked on each and every L-1011 TriStar produced by Lockheed, all 250 of them.
Ile then refurbished many DC-10s at Tracor, a company famous for such aircraft as the Super Guppy Transport, a giant plane designed to carry huge missile components too large for conventional transport. She also worked on many C-130 variants for the military and even spent time in San Juan, Puerto Rico, rebuilding a jetliner damaged during an aborted takeoff.
Ile's career in the aircraft industry reached its zenith in Wichita, Kansas, in 1991, after she delivered two Boeing 747-400s to the United States Government, one of which was earmarked for duty as Air Force One, the presidential aircraft. Ile installed wiring harnesses for the plane's self-defense ECM components.
During Ile's career, she worked on hundreds of aircraft types. Some of them were covered with cloth, some with aluminum, others with exotic materials such as titanium and carbon fiber. She worked on vehicles powered by reciprocating piston engines and propellers, turboprop engines, pure jets and rockets. She bucked rivets on fighter planes and made up delicate wiring harnesses for sophisticated spacecraft. Ile built planes destined for the public eye, proud, of her bragging rights and occasional media attention. But she also worked in secret blacked-out hangers in the desert, able to tell family only that the work she was doing was "exciting".
Ile enjoyed every minute of her career. She's proud to have held her own in an industry known then as a "man's world". She earned the respect of fellow workers and superiors with her "can-do" attitude and love of the job. Women like Ile set the standard for today's career-oriented woman long before it was fashionable. Her family, friends - and her country - are proud of her.