3 Fly Aviators Meet From Across the World
(From left to right: Valentina Tereshkova, Barbara Barrett and Ludmila Shvetsova)
Barbara Barrett, Past IWF President & IWF Member of Arizona and Montana, paid a brief visit to Ludmila Shvetsova, IWF Vice President and President of IWF-Russia. While there, she met Shvetsova’s colleague and friend, Valentina Tereshkova.
Each of these three women has an extraordinary aviation origin story. Barrett earned her distinction as the first civilian woman to land in an F/A-18 on an aircraft carrier. Since then she has served as Deputy Administrator of the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) and received cosmonaut certification from her training from the Gagarin Cosmonaut Training Center in Star City, Russia.
As a retired Astronaut, Tereshkova is the first woman to have flown in space in the Vostok 6 on 16 June 1963. Coincidentally, next month will be the 50th milestone since her flight into space.
Shvetsova herself early in her career, worked on the wing of the Antonov (An-225) Mryiva (meaning ‘Dream’ in Ukrainian) strategic airlift cargo aircraft. One day while working on the aircraft, a leader told her that she would do much bigger things in her life. Today, she serves as Deputy & Co- Speaker for the State of Duma of the Federal Assembly of the Russian Federation.
Three women from across the world met for a brief moment in time and forged a connection between their parallel pasts and their remarkable successes thereafter.











