Jacqueline Cochran grew up in poverty in a foster home. At age eight she went to work in a cotton mill in Georgia; she later was trained as a beautician and pursued that career in Montgomery, Alabama, in Pensacola, Florida, and from roughly 1931 in New York City. She took her first flying lessons in 1932 and soon mastered the technical aspects of aviation and navigation, later studying privately with a navy pilot friend in San Diego, California. Meanwhile, in 1934, she organized a cosmetics firm that grew and prospered under her management until she sold it in 1963.

In 1935 Cochran became the first woman to enter the Bendix Transcontinental Air Race; in 1937 she came in third, and in 1938 she won the Bendix Trophy, flying a Seversky pursuit plane. In June 1941 she piloted a bomber to England and there, as a flight captain in the British Air Transport Auxiliary, trained a group of female pilots for war transport service. Upon her return to the United States, she undertook a similar program for the Army Air Forces and in July 1943 was named director of the Women's Air Force Service Pilots—the WASPs—which supplied more than a thousand auxiliary pilots for the armed forces. At the end of the war she served for a time as a Pacific and European correspondent for Liberty magazine. In 1945 she became the first woman civilian to be awarded the Distinguished Service Medal and in 1948 was commissioned a lieutenant colonel in the Air Force Reserve.

In 1953, eager to make the transition to jet aircraft, Cochran became the first woman to break the sound barrier, piloting an F-86, and that year set world speed records for 15-, 100-, and 500-km courses. Her autobiographical The Stars at Noon, written with Floyd B. Odlum (her husband from 1936), appeared in 1954.

Cochran continued to break her old records and set new ones, including an altitude mark of 55,253 feet (16,841 metres) in 1961, and in 1964 she set the standing women's world speed record of 1,429 miles (2,300 km) per hour in an F-104G Super Star jet. In 1969 she was promoted to colonel in the reserve, from which she retired in 1970. She continued as a special National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) consultant after her retirement.

In 1959–63 Cochran was the first woman president of the Fédération Aéronautique Internationale, and she was also a member of many other aviation and service-connected organizations. She was inducted into the International Aerospace Hall of Fame in 1965 and the U.S. Aviation Hall of Fame in 1971.