Iris Cummings Critchell, who displayed her derring-do in the water and in the air, swimming with the U.S. Olympic team at the 1936 Summer Games, flying with the WASPs during World War II and training hundreds of pilots in an era when few women took to the skies, died Jan. 24 in Claremont, Calif. She was 104.

Harvey Mudd College in Claremont, where she taught aeronautics for three decades, announced her death but did not cite a cause.

Ever since she was a young girl growing up in Los Angeles, Ms. Critchell was inspired by feats of bravura in water and in flight. She swam more often in the Pacific Ocean than she did in the pool. At age 7, she watched Charles Lindbergh — who had made history with his solo nonstop transatlantic flight a year earlier — fly in the 1928 National Air Races above Los Angeles.

Four years later, she attended the 1932 Summer Olympics, which were held in L.A. and galvanized her interest in competitive swimming. Encouraged by her parents, she began training and became a three-time national champion in the 200-meter breaststroke.

In 1936, she landed a place on the U.S. Olympic swimming team and sailed to Europe for what would be the last Games before the outbreak of World War II. By the end of her life, she was the last living athlete from the Berlin Olympics, according to the International Olympic Committee.

Ms. Critchell — who was 15 at the time and known as Iris Cummings — placed fourth in her heat and did not reach the medal round. She later remarked that she had “wanted to achieve more.” The athlete who attracted the greatest notice at the Berlin Games was Jesse Owens, the African American track star who challenged the Nazi ideology of Aryan supremacy with his spectacular performance and four gold medals.

“Since Germany was showing its best face to the world, Hitler insisted that his goose-stepping soldiers be on their best behavior,” Ms. Critchell said years later in an interview with the Christian Science Monitor. “But at the same time, you couldn’t miss the superior attitude of those wearing German military uniforms.” Even to a teenager, she said, the looming darkness was evident.

The 1940 Olympics, scheduled to take place in Tokyo, were canceled because of World War II. By the time the United States entered the conflict in 1941, following the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor, Ms. Critchell’s attention had shifted from the pool to the skies.

She started taking flying lessons while at the University of Southern California, earned her pilot’s license — a rarity for young women of the era — and in 1942 joined the Women’s Auxiliary Ferrying Squadron, a precursor to the Women’s Air Force Service Pilots, better known as the WASPs. At the time, female pilots were barred from combat roles but contributed to the war effort as civilian pilots.

For two years, Ms. Critchell flew military planes to bases across the United States, from which they departed for war. According to Harvey Mudd College, she ferried more than 25 kinds of military airplanes, including trainers, fighters, transport planes and advanced aircraft such as the versatile P-38 Lightning and P-61 Black Widow, a night fighter.

Ever after World War II, Ms. Critchell was still racing across the skies, tying for first place in 1957 in the women’s transcontinental air race known colloquially as the Powder Puff Derby.

Iris Cummings was born in Los Angeles on Dec. 21, 1920. Her father was a physician who practiced an early form of sports medicine and was a former athletic director at Swarthmore College in Pennsylvania. Her mother was a high school teacher.

“I happened to have an unusual background and unusual education, both physical and academic, because my father brought me up in physical activity, moving in the ocean and doing swimming competitions and so forth,” Ms. Critchell later told a USC interviewer. “And then my mother was unusual because she was a college graduate and teacher, and women didn’t do that then.”

Ms. Critchell was hampered in her efforts to train for the 1936 Olympics by the fact that she was responsible for raising her own funds for her travel. She was unable to practice at all in the 10 days before her ship set sail for Europe, she told Swimming World, because she was frantically collecting money.

Even as an Olympic swimmer, her eyes were often toward the skies. She was fascinated when she saw the Hindenburg, the 804-foot German-built airship that would explode a year later, sailing over Berlin’s Olympic Stadium.

Ms. Critchell studied physical sciences and mathematics at USC and earned her pilot’s license, as well as a ground-instructor’s rating, by the time she was a senior, she told the Monitor.

In 1944, Ms. Critchell married Howard “Critch” Critchell, who served as a pilot during World War II and later flew commercial planes. He died in 2015. Survivors include two children, Sandie Clary and Robin Critchell; three grandchildren; and eight great-grandchildren.

Ms. Critchell taught aviation at USC before joining Harvey Mudd College, where she helped establish an aeronautical program that trained scientists, aerospace engineers and researchers, and astronauts, according to the university. Even after her official retirement in 1990, she continued teaching aeronautics.

Ms. Critchell received the Federal Aviation Administration’s Wright Brothers Master Pilot Award in 2006.

From the moment she saw Lindbergh in the sky to her years teaching students the marvels of aeronautics, she considered it a “privilege” to fly.

“It’s an indescribable pleasure to be up there with the elements and enjoy it all,” Ms. Critchell told the German newspaper Die Welt am Sonntag last year. “It’s all about you, the movement of the air, the wind and what you can do with your plane.”

First Published: February 1, 2025, 7:05 p.m.