Jet Lady

Angela Masson is a true Renaissance woman: an artist, inventor, a decorated pilot, television host and – naturally – musician whose life we can but marvel at.

Born in California, Angela began flying lessons at age 15 and, shortly after obtaining her pilot’s license, she started air racing. At 21 years-old, while flying in the Powder Puff Derby, an annual transcontinental air race for women pilots which ran for 30 years from 1947, she set a record as the youngest person to fly coast to coast in a high-performance aircraft.

In 1971 she trained armed forces pilot cadets at fellow aviatrix Claire Walters Flight School to build her flight experience, getting over 1,000 flight hours in less than a year. “The place where I was teaching had two bathrooms,” she told reporter Benjamin Gleisser in 2019, “and both were for men. So I wrote ‘WO’ in lipstick in front of the word on one of the doors. There was a law on the books that said, essentially, ‘Women shall not fly for the military.’ I thought, Wait a minute, why can’t we be pilots? The military’s excuse was they didn’t have helmets that would fit us.” She then went on to fly as a charter pilot for Express Airways out of Naval Air Station Lemoore on a civilian contract for the Navy and became a full-time commercial pilot the following year.

Frustrated to see her former male students flying jets while females were barred (bizarrely they were allowed to fly helicopters, the US military not considering whirlybirds proper aeroplanes!), she went back to school, writing her Ph.D. dissertation “Elements of Organizational Discrimination: The Air Force Response to Women as Military Pilots”. That paper was read by Robert Crandall, president of American Airlines, who hired her, initially as a flight engineer on a Boeing 727, in 1976. Shortly after she became a pilot and was the first woman to fly as First Officer on the Boeing 707, 767 and Douglas DC-10. The Ph.D. that had so impressed Crandall was presented before Congress during the Hearings about opening military the Academies to women. In 1978, as airlines began investigating the idea of commercial flights into space, Angela’s name was being put forward, the first and only woman considered to pilot such a enterprise.

By the late 1990s she was living in Florida, still mixing and making and applying for patents for her various inventions. As their most senior female pilot, she finally retired from American Airlines in December 2007 after 31 years’ service. But of course, she had many more strings to her bow. In 1980 Angela decided to run for Mayor of Los Angeles. She didn’t win, and we should probably be grateful for that, because if she had become a politician we may never have heard her 1982 opus, Jet Lady.  

Jet Lady, released under the name Tangela Tricoli, is Angela’s her one and only album… but what a marvel that is. Released independently (and now worth a fortune) the disc features Angela/Tangela singing her own compositions, accompanied by her own solo acoustic guitar. Sounding like a cross between Frances Baskerville the Singing Psychic and Lucia Pamela, Jet Lady contains such stone-cold classics as Stinky Poodle (surely the inspiration for Phoebe Buffay’s Smelly Cat), Life of a Housewife and Space Woman. Occasionally, as on the original Stinky Poodle she double tracks her voice; many of the tracks are slathered with echo and reverb, producing a unique, ethereal sound unlike anything else. It’s just wonderful. As she herself said (in a 2010 interview), “I sing about everything I do. I can’t sing on-key, but that doesn’t stop me.” It’s a sentiment very close to my own heart.

She followed up the release with her own cable TV show, which ran for four years in the Hollywood area. By the late 1990s she had retired and was living in Florida, although still mixing and making and applying for patents for her various inventions. Sadly she would not record a whole album again, however in 2003 Arf! Arf! Records reissued the album on CD, complete with extra material, campaign ads, unreleased demos and a brand new re-recording of Stinky Poodle.

Angela may have retired from commercial work, but as recently as last year she was still passing on her love of flight, teaching at the St. Augustine High School Aerospace Academy and at Embry-Riddle Aeronautical University in Daytona Beach, Florida. “Every day, I try to share with my students the love of flying,” she explained to Benjamin Gleisser. “Aviation is a lifestyle. There’s something sparkly in it for everybody. It gives you a reason to wake up in the morning and play with the reality of being alive.”

Here are two tracks to get you started – the original recording of Stinky Poodle and the wonderful Space Woman, but I urge you to go buy the CD of Jet Lady and wallow in the brilliance of Angela Masson, aka Tangela Tricoli.

Enjoy!

Download Poodle HERE

Download Space HERE