From NKAA, Notable Kentucky African Americans Database (main entry)

Willa Brown Chappell was born in Glasgow, KY, the daughter of Hallie Mae and Eric B. Brown. She left Kentucky for Gary, Indiana, and in 1932 graduated from Indiana State Teachers College [now Indiana State University]. She earned her master aviation certificate from Aeronautical University in 1936, learning how to fly with Cornelius R. Coffey, and the two later established the Coffey School of Aeronautics at Harlem Airport in Chicago, training African American pilots and aviation mechanics. She earned  her master's degree from Northwestern University in 1938, and her commercial pilot certificate and instructor's rating and radio license from Coffey School of Aeronautics in 1939.

Chappell was employed as a school teacher before becoming a pilot, teaching at Roosevelt High School in Gary, Indiana from 1927-1932. (Constructed in 1930, Theodore Roosevelt High School in Gary is one of only three high schools in Indiana built specifically to serve the educational needs of Black Americans in the Jim Crow era.)

In 1939 she was a federal coordinator of civilian pilot training. Chappell settled in Chicago. She was the first African American woman to become licensed as a pilot in the U.S. and the first African American in the Civil Air Patrol.

Chappell founded the National Airmen's Association of America and trained more than 200 students who became Tuskegee pilots. She and her husband, Cornelius Robinson Coffey, owned and operated the first flight school for African Americans.

Chappell was also a political activist: in 1945 she organized the Young Republican Club of the Second Ward of Chicago and was an unsuccessful Republican candidate for Congress in 1946.

For more see Willa Brown Chappell at KET’s Electronic Field Trip to the Aviation Museum of Kentucky; the Willa B. Brown entry in the Chicago Negro Almanac and Reference Book, edited by E. R. Rather; her entry in the Kentucky Commission on Human Rights Hall of Fame; her entry in the Women in Aviation International Hall of Fame; her entry in the National Air and Space Museum; K. Heise, "Willa Chappell, pioneer Black pilot," Chicago Tribune, 7/21/1992, Chicagoland section, p. 9; and Willa Beatrice Brown at Find-a-Grave.