She was the woman in the floppy jungle hat, standing in front of a Hiller 360 helicopter—young, with a confident smile, dressed in khaki coveralls.

Her photo immediately caught my eye the first day I walked into a warehouse in the San Francisco Bay Area that housed the massive collection of helicopter legend Stanley Hiller’s aircraft and aviation memorabilia. It was 1991, and I was a grad student starting a job as the curator of the Hiller Aviation Museum.

There I stood, surrounded by all manner of Hiller aircraft—production helicopters, experimental Rotorcycles, and even the infamous Hiller Flying Platform. But who was that woman in the floppy hat? I had to know her story.

What I would learn became an obsession with the story of a true aviation pioneer—a story I would eventually travel repeatedly across an ocean to pursue, to a sixth-floor apartment in the Paris suburb of Issy-les-Moulineaux.

There, I would sit for hours, quietly soaking up the remarkable memories of Valérie André, the woman in the floppy hat.