Jane Briggs Hart

Jane "Janey" Briggs Hart ( Briggs; October 21, 1921 – June 5, 2015) was an American aviator and in the 1960s, became one of the Mercury 13 women who qualified physically in the same tests as those used for male astronauts. She earned her first pilot's license during World War II and later became the first licensed female helicopter pilot in Michigan.

In the early 1960s, Hart was chosen to participate in the Lovelace Foundation's Woman in Space Program, a privately funded project designed to test women pilots for astronaut fitness by subjecting them to the same physical tests developed by NASA for astronauts. (From 1921 until his death in 1952, Walter Briggs was a partial and then majority owner of the Detroit Tigers.) Raised Catholic, Jane Briggs attended the Academies of the Sacred Heart in Detroit, Grosse Pointe and Torresdale, and the Manhattanville College in New York. In 1970, at age 49, she completed a BA in anthropology from George Washington University in Washington, D.C. She was also active in opposition to the Vietnam War, which was sometimes awkward for her senator husband. Despite this, Senator Hart was unwavering in his support for his wife, although he did not agree with many of her decisions.

After her husband's death, Hart donated several boxes of scrapbooks, photographs and newspaper clippings of her life as a senator's wife and aviator to the University of Michigan's Bentley Historical Library.

The Jane B. Hart Awards were established at the anthropology department at George Washington University in her honor.

In 2007, she was inducted into the Michigan Women's Hall of Fame.