Born in Pensacola, Florida, Skelton grew up near the Naval Air Station and developed an obsession with flight from early childhood, preferring model airplanes to dolls. A Navy ensign named Kenneth Wright took an interest in the family and taught her to fly, allowing her to solo in his Taylorcraft when she was just 12 years old. She received her Civil Aviation Authority private pilot's license at 16. She qualified for the Women Airforce Service Pilots program on skill alone, but the minimum age requirement of 18½ kept her out, and the program was discontinued four months before she reached eligibility.
After high school in 1944, she took a night job with Eastern Airlines as a clerk — claiming to be 18 — so she could rent aircraft and fly during the day. She earned her commercial pilot licence at 18 and became a certified flight instructor the following year, teaching at Tampa's Peter O. Knight Airport.
Skelton entered aerobatics almost by accident in 1945 when her father organized a fundraiser airshow and the airport manager suggested she perform stunts she had never attempted. She borrowed a Fairchild PT-19 and learned to loop and roll from veteran aerobatic pilot Clem Whitteneck, mastering the basics within two weeks. In 1946 she purchased a 1929 Great Lakes 2T-1A Sport Trainer biplane and turned professional.
Her signature maneuver — cutting a ribbon strung between two fishing poles with her propeller while flying inverted just 10 feet off the ground — became a crowd centerpiece on the air show circuit. In 1948 she acquired a rare Pitts Special biplane built by Curtis Pitts, painting it red and white and dubbing it Little Stinker. She flew with her Chihuahua, Little Tinker, fitted with a custom working parachute, riding in her lap.
Skelton was US Female Aerobatic Champion in 1948, 1949, and 1950. Three consecutive titles left her without further competitive challenges in the discipline, and physical exhaustion from the nonstop circuit led her to retire from aerobatics in 1951. She and her first husband later reacquired Little Stinker and donated it to the Smithsonian Institution in 1985; it is now on inverted display at the Steven F. Udvar-Hazy Center near Washington Dulles International Airport.
In 1949 she set the world light-plane altitude record of 25,763 feet in a Piper Cub, then broke her own mark two years later with a flight of 29,050 feet in the same type. She also held the world speed record for piston-engined aircraft at 421.6 mph over a 3-km course in a P-51 Mustang racing plane.
After relocating to Raleigh, North Carolina in 1951, Skelton met NASCAR founder Bill France Sr., who invited her to Daytona Beach speed week in February 1954. She drove the pace car at Daytona, then climbed into a Dodge sedan and was clocked at 105.88 mph on the beach sand, setting a stock-car speed record for women. That day launched her second career.
She became the first woman to hold an Automobile Association of America auto race driver's license and the first female test driver in the auto industry, joining Chrysler's Dodge division in 1954. She set four Feminine World Land Speed Records and competed in events across South America and the Baja Peninsula. She was the first woman to drive a jet car over 300 mph at the Bonneville Salt Flats. Her final Daytona Beach Road Course women's record stood at 156.99 mph in 1956. That same year she broke Cannonball Baker's 40-year-old transcontinental auto record from New York to Los Angeles.
In 1956 Skelton joined the advertising agency Campbell-Ewald and began working with General Motors, becoming GM's first female technical narrator at major auto shows and later official spokeswoman for Chevrolet. She set numerous records in Corvettes and owned ten of them over the years; she helped launch what became Corvette Quarterly. Between 1956 and 1957, designers Harley Earl and Bill Mitchell created a special translucent gold Corvette for her, which she drove as the NASCAR pace car at Daytona in 1957. She became vice president of Campbell-Ewald's Women's Market and Advertising department in 1969 and retired in 1976.
In 1959 she became the first woman to undergo NASA's physical and psychological tests, the same battery given to the Mercury Seven astronauts. The tests were administered at the request of Look magazine, and she was featured on the February 2, 1960 cover. The astronauts nicknamed her "7½." The United States Navy awarded her honorary wings. Despite her results and advocacy, NASA did not open astronaut selection to women at that time.
Skelton was inducted into more than ten halls of fame, including the National Aviation Hall of Fame (2005), the International Motorsports Hall of Fame, the Motorsports Hall of Fame of America (2008), the NASCAR International Automotive Hall of Fame (1983, as its first woman inductee), and the Automotive Hall of Fame (2025). The International Aerobatic Club established the Betty Skelton First Lady of Aerobatics Trophy in 1988, awarded annually to the highest-scoring woman pilot at the United States National Aerobatic Championships.
She died on August 31, 2011, in Florida, having spent the final years of her life in The Villages with her second husband, retired naval surgeon Dr. Allan Erde. At an age when most of her retirement-community neighbors used golf carts, Skelton drove a red Corvette convertible.