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First female fighter pilot in the world2/27/2023 ![]() ![]() More than 25,000 women applied for pilot training under the WASP program, and 1,830 were accepted while 1,074 graduated, and 900 remained in service at the program’s end. As a result, the two units were merged into a single group, WASP in August 1943, with Cochran as the USAAF director for women pilots, while Love was named as the WASP executive on the Air Transport Command’s Ferrying Division Staff. The WAFS and WFTD complemented each other, but this also wasn’t the best use of resources in wartime. WFTD pilots were issued with large khaki coveralls-nicknamed “zoot suits”-rather than a military uniform, and the pilots were ordered to wear the most appropriate shoes as well as a hairnet. The female pilots were taught to fly military aircraft according to the USAAF instructions, and it emphasized cross country flying with less emphasis on acrobatics and with no gunnery or close formation flight training. All the trainees also had to have had at least two hundred hours of flight time, but that was also reduced to just thirty-five hours. Trainees were originally between twenty-one and thirty-five years old, but that was later dropped to just eighteen years of age. The twenty-three-week training program began in Houston before moving to Sweetwater, Texas, where the program was increased to thirty weeks with 210 hours of flying. Cochran however made her case, and she was soon designated as the director of the Women’s Flying Training Detachment (WFTD). The original mission was to ferry USAAF trainers and light aircraft from the factories to bases in the United States, but soon the pilots were delivering fighters, bombers and transports.Ĭochran, who had observed RAF in combat while in the UK, returned to the United States the day before the announcement of the WAFS and was angry that Love’s proposal had been accepted while her own was rejected. In fact, women who joined WAFS actually averaged about one thousand hours of flying experience. The unit never numbered more than twenty-eight pilots, but it required that women pilots would have at least five hundred hours of flying time and a two-hundred-horsepower engine rating. Originally Tunner suggested the pilots would serve as part of the Women's Army Auxiliary Corps, but instead a new civilian unit was created as the Women’s Auxiliary Ferrying Squadron (WAFS). Love and Tunner devised a plan for an aviation ferry program that utilized female pilots. Love also happened to be married to an Army Air Corps Reserve officer who worked for the unit’s commander, Colonel William H. Meanwhile, another female aviation pioneer, test-pilot Nancy Harkness Love, proposed a similar plan to the Air Corps’ Ferry Command-but nothing was done until the United States entered the war at the end of 1941. ![]()
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