Irene Leverton

Irene H. Leverton (March 3, 1927 – July 23, 2017) was an American pilot and a member of the Mercury 13 project.

Life
She was a member of the Ninety-Nines. In 1961, she was selected for the Women in Space Program.who was selected to be one of the "Mercury 13" project women, passed away July 23, 2017, at the age of 90 in Paulden, Ariz. A Chicago native, she was inducted into the Women in Aviation Hall of Fame in 1966 and the Arizona Aviation Hall of Fame in 2004. With an aviation career starting in 1944 and ending in 2011, she was a pilot, flight instructor and check pilot.

In 1961, Leverton was selected for what is now known as the “Mercury 13” project, a privately funded program that enlisted women to undergo some of the same physical and psychological tests as the “Mercury 7” male astronauts. Although it was never an official NASA program, members of the First Lady Astronaut Trainees (also known as FLATs) secretly trained to become astronauts for America's first human spaceflight program in the early 1960s. In the 1980s, Leverton moved to Phoenix and then to Prescott, where she started her business, Aviation Resource Management in 1985. She was a certificated Federal Aviation Administration Airline Transport Pilot and worked with the Civil Air Patrol squadron in Prescott as a check-ride pilot. She graduated from San Jose State College with an AA in 1976 later receiving her flight training from Embry–Riddle Aeronautical University.