Nancy Bird was born in Kew, on the north coast of New South Wales, in 1915. At that time aeroplanes were new and exciting, and most people had never been near one. Nancy was different. As a young girl she folded paper planes, read everything she could find about flying and told anyone who would listen that one day she would be a pilot.

In 1933, at just seventeen, she travelled to Sydney to take flying lessons at a school run by Charles Kingsford Smith, the most famous aviator in Australia. She was so short that she needed cushions behind her back to reach the controls. It did not matter. In 1935, aged nineteen, Nancy earned her commercial pilot's licence, becoming the youngest Australian woman to do so.

With help from her father, she bought a small plane of her own and set off to earn a living in the air. She gave joy flights at country shows, charging passengers a few shillings for a few minutes above the paddocks. Then she took on a very different job. In the far west of New South Wales, families lived hundreds of kilometres from the nearest hospital. Nancy was hired to fly a nurse to remote stations and towns for the Far West Children's Health Scheme. She carried sick children, new mothers and medical supplies across country with no proper airstrips, often landing in paddocks. Locals called her the 'Angel of the Outback'.

Nancy stopped flying for a living when she married in 1939, but she never left aviation behind. During the Second World War she trained women to support the air force. In 1950 she founded the Australian Women Pilots' Association so that women flyers could meet and support one another.

Nancy Bird Walton died in 2009 at the age of 93. The year before, Qantas had named its first giant A380 aircraft after her, and the new international airport in western Sydney also carries her name. The girl who folded paper planes had become one of the most honoured pilots in Australia's history.