Valérie André, Daring French Army Copter Pilot, Dies at 102

New York Times

05-02-2025

Valérie André was 10 years old in 1932 when, armed with a congratulatory bouquet, she greeted the hero aviator Maryse Hilsz at the Strasbourg airfield in France.
She was already committed to becoming a doctor, an ambitious career goal for a young lady at the time. But she was so warmly received when she presented the flowers to Ms. Hilsz, who had just completed a record-breaking round-trip flight between Paris and Saigon, that she committed herself to another formidable objective: She decided to become an airplane pilot.
Valérie André not only pursued both professions; she thrived in them. She became a brain surgeon, a parachutist and a helicopter pilot who was said to be the first woman to fly rescue missions in combat zones for any military force. She was also the first Frenchwoman to be named a general and was a five-time winner of the Croix de Guerre, for bravery in Indochina and Algeria.
Dr. André died on Jan. 21 in Issy-les-Moulineaux, a suburb of Paris. She was 102.
'It all began with the dream of a 10-year-old girl, flying like a star,' Olivia Penichou, a spokeswoman for the French Ministry of Defense, said in announcing the death on social media. 'She worked with determination to ensure that the armed forces opened up to women specialties as closed as those of fighter pilot.'
The announcement did not say if any immediate family members survived.
In 120 combat missions in the early 1950s in the dense jungles and soggy rice paddies of Indochina, where the French were trying without success to repulse Communist guerrillas, Dr. André flew 168 wounded soldiers from the battlefields to hospitals in Hanoi — including enemy soldiers, when there was room on the two litters mounted on her single-seat Hiller chopper.
She later flew 365 missions into combat zones in North Africa, where Algerians were seeking independence from France. In 1976 she was promoted to general, the first woman to be elevated to that rank in the French Army.
But while her heroism was celebrated at home and she wrote two memoirs in French, her exploits were not as well known abroad — at least until recently.
She was the subject of a 2021 documentary, 'Madame le Général,' and of an English-language book, 'Helicopter Heroine: Valérie André — Surgeon, Pioneer Rescue Pilot, and Her Courage Under Fire,' by Charles Morgan Evans, an aviation historian, published in 2023.
Valérie Collin André was born on April 21, 1922, in Strasbourg, in the Alsace region of northeastern France near the German border. Her father taught music at a boys' high school. Her mother encouraged her four daughters to pursue the same opportunities for higher education that were available to her five sons.
Dr. André would promote that agenda throughout her career.
'I considered that each woman possesses the possibility of choosing her own life, even if that choice required more tenacity than that of a man,' Mr. Evans quoted her as saying.
When she decided to indulge her passions for both medicine and aviation, she tutored students in French and math to pay for flying lessons. She received her pilot's license when she was 16.
Two years later, in 1940, the Germans invaded. She fled Alsace — first to southwestern France, where the University of Strasbourg had decamped, and then to Nazi-occupied Paris, where she continued her studies at the Sorbonne.
While most women studying medicine in France at the time were shunted into pediatrics, gynecology or public health, she majored in neurology. She received a medical degree in 1948, when she was 26.
'At the end of my medical studies, the dean of the faculty of medicine told us the military in Indochina did not have enough doctors,' Dr. André told the aviation magazine Vertical in 2017. He suggested that she join the army.
While working as a surgeon, she witnessed a helicopter demonstration in Saigon early in 1950 and persuaded her superiors that evacuating the wounded from combat zones to hospitals by chopper would be better than parachuting, which she had done, to treat them on the ground. She later told the Smithsonian News Service that soldiers were awe-struck when they saw 'a girl, of all things, falling out of the sky.'
She returned to France for preliminary training, underwent further training in Vietnam beginning that October, and then began commanding her first medevac helicopter flights early in 1952.
According to the National Air and Space Museum at the Smithsonian Institution, she was one of the first 12 women in the world to receive a helicopter pilot rating and the first woman to fly a helicopter into combat zones.
In 1953, after surviving a crash, she doubled back to France, where she established medical units at military heliports. In 1957 she was deployed to Algeria, where she logged hundreds of rescue missions before coming home in 1962.
As the army's physician general and a member of a presidential commission, she lobbied indefatigably to grant women a more active role in the military. She retired in 1981 as inspector general of medicine.
Before she moved into a retirement home in Issy-les-Moulineaux, which happens to be near the Paris heliport, Dr. André lived on the top floor of a six-story building nearby.
'I wanted a lot of sky,' she said.
Because she was a petite woman — she weighed less than 100 pounds — her helicopter with Red Cross insignias could accommodate a stretcher on each skid. Before she flew solo, she was trained by an Air Force colonel, Alexis Santini. In 1963, she married him.
Well before he died in 1997, she outranked him.