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[[caption]] Mrs. Betty Gillies was the first woman to fly a P-47 to an Army airfield. [[/caption]]

OUR WOMEN PILOTS
By CHARLOTTE KNIGHT

At an east coast airfield a P-47 roars in for a perfect landing. The pilot steps out of the cockpit of the Army's most powerful single-engine fighter and calls a greeting to the crew chief.

A few yards away an Air Force captain who had casually watched the ship come in does a hasty double-take. He turns to a fellow officer:" Good Lord, do you see what I see? The pilot! It's a girl––and that's a P-47!"

A C-47 in full war paint sits at a California base, warmed up and ready for ferrying to the middle west. Two girls in flying gear step up to the crew chief. "All set? Let's get going."

"OK," he replies good naturedly, giving them the once-over and wondering if someone has kidded them into thinking they could go along for the ride. "I'm just waiting for the pilots."

"We are the pilots."

In a few minutes the stupefied crew chief is watching the big twin-engined transport gain the skies in a smooth take-off with the girls at the controls.

IN the control tower of an Army airfield in Texas, there's a puzzled frown on the face of the operator. He'd swear that was a woman's voice asking for landing instructions. He checks the pilot's name--N. H. Love--but that's no help. It simply could be a woman pilot for the plane is a B-25. He turns to the operations officer. Together they catch the bomber roll in at 110 mph and come to a stop. They look carefully as the pilot steps out.

"Well, I'll be damned," says the control tower operator. "I was right."

Elsewhere, P-51s, P-39s, C-60s, C-78s, A-24s and seventeen different types of smaller ships are being ferried around the country by a handful of women pilots, all members of the Women's Auxiliary Ferrying Squadron and all working for the Ferrying Division of the Air Transport Command.

The WAFS were expected to be flying A-20s, P-38s and P-40s by September.

The reception at no two fields is alike. Sometimes the girls are accepted without question into a fraternity that respects a good pilot regardless of sex, but often enough the atmosphere is considerably more chilly than it is upstairs. These rebuffs the girls have come to accept as part of the game. More often the reception is of the plain "I'll-be-damned" variety. 

Whatever the reaction, the only thing that matters is that the WAFS apprenticeship is over. Originally slated to ferry online training and liaison craft, they have no graduated to the big-league ships and can hold their own with the best of them.

The girls have been on the spot since the WAFS was organized in September 1942. Their smooth, white necks have been stuck way out and they know it. They've had to work hard and quietly to prove to a lot of doubting Air Corps Thomases that they could do a man's job. They've endured everything from patronizingly raised eyebrows to forthright resentment, and they've held their silence. And now they're saying it with combat ships--and saying it with the blessings of the Army Air Forces.

This is no sensation-begging affair, nor are these girls interested in usurping man's prior rights in the skies. They are not out to compete with men, but they are concerned with doing a man-sized job and doing it well. Today, woman's place is where she is needed. And until this war is won, that place is in the cockpit of ships women can fly from factory to field and, by doing so, release men pilots for combat duty. 

At the moment their numbers in the

10    Air Force, September, 1943