France, April 19 -- Long before she was France's highest-ranking female officer, Valerie Andre was a girl who wanted to fly. 

"I decided when I was three years old that I would be a pilot," she told RFI in 2010, then aged 88.  

"I used to cut out articles from newspapers and aviation magazines. I collected it all. They were my idols, the aviators of days gone by." 

Pioneers including Elisa Laroche, the first woman to get a pilot's licence in 1910, and Adrienne Bolland, the first woman to fly over the Andes, in 1921, had shown Andre that women had a place in the sky.  

But they didn't yet have a place in the armed forces. A handful of wo...