Elena Popescu was born in 1914 in Bucharest, the daughter of a railway worker. She learned to fly at the age of 19, earned her pilot's license at 22, and by the time World War II began she was one of Romania's most experienced female pilots. Romania, under the authoritarian government of Ion Antonescu, had aligned itself with Nazi Germany, and by 1941 the Romanian Air Force was actively engaged in operations against the Soviet Union on the Eastern Front.
Popescu volunteered for combat duty repeatedly and was repeatedly rejected. The Romanian Air Force had no framework for female combat pilots, and the brass had no interest in creating one. Popescu, who was not the kind of woman who accepted no for an answer, found an alternative route: she became a civilian pilot for the Romanian military's photo-reconnaissance unit. As a civilian contractor, she was technically not subject to the same regulations as Air Force officers. She flew her first reconnaissance mission over the Eastern Front in 1942 and never stopped.
Over the course of the next three years, Popescu flew more than 850 combat missions in a de Havilland Mosquito -- a twin-engine, wooden-bodied aircraft that was one of the fastest in the war and notoriously difficult to handle. She flew over enemy territory at low altitude, photographing troop positions, supply lines, and fortifications. She flew in all weather conditions, through flak corridors, and on at least three occasions, she was shot down and had to make emergency landings behind Soviet lines, on each occasion walking back to Romanian territory and reporting for her next mission within days.
Her commanding officers, who had initially tried to prevent her from flying, eventually became some of her strongest supporters. She was awarded the Order of the Crown, Romania's highest military honor, and the Aeronautical Medal. She was promoted to the rank of colonel after the war -- an honorary rank, as she had never officially been in the military -- and continued flying for the Romanian civil aviation authority until her retirement in 1970.
She died in 2006 at the age of 91. Her Mosquito, which she had named Dream (Vis in Romanian), had been destroyed in a hangar fire in 1945, but she kept a photograph of it on her wall until the day she died. In 2012, the Romanian Air Force named a new training aircraft after her.