WASP pilots part 2

I do not know why I am making a post on this subject but I am. Actually I do. I was surfing the web looking for something aviation related and ran into an article about Hazel Ying Lee, a WASP pilot of Chinese descent during WW2. She was ferrying an airplane that was forced down in a wheat field and chased by a pitchfork wielding farmer that thought the Japanese. Having seen the movie '1941' I can see the humor of it.

 She is reported to be a 'fly anything and go anywhere' type of pilot. She was later killed in a Montana airplane crash caused by bad weather and confusion in the control tower. She suffered a mid-air collision and succumbed to her injuries two days later. 

Incidentally her brother was KIA at about the same time in Europe and her parents had a damned hard time getting her and her brother buried in the white section of the cemetary. (Refusing them was just plain wrong.)

That led me to opening another thing on one Sylvia Clayton. It posted her eulogy which began with this: 

Sylvia Dahmes Clayton On November 12, 2011 Sylvia Dahmes Clayton, WASP Class 43-5, climbed into the P-51 she so dearly loved and left the bonds of this earth soaring into the sun. 

I admit I kinda welled up when I read that. There was also a short video of her flying a Cessna at 91 years old. It is said she left her walker on the tarmac to take to the skies.

The program made a lot of sense in a time where women were generally delegated to the kitchen. While the American public would have gone ape $hit over sending women into combat having women ferry airplanes and tow targets made a lot of sense as it freed up a lot of men for combat duty. Look at it as an extension of Rosie the Riveter.

Actually it started off as two programs but shortly merged into one.  Jackie Corcoran, a self made woman that later became the first woman to punch a hole in the sky that got some of her training from Chuck Yeager was in charge of training.

While the program wasn't completely snow white, they had Asians and Hispanics in it, one black applicant was turned down by Corcoran because she felt that predjudice toward women was bad enough to deal with without adding skin color to it.  Looking at it in the context of the times I can certainly see her point. You have to remember that we are talking about 1943 and not 2024. The woman's name was Janet Bragg and she managed to make a career of some sort in aviation, retiring in 1965 with about 2000 hours of flight time.

One woman say combat. She was giving someone a lesson at Pearl Harbor at preciesly the wrong time on 7 Dec, 1941. When she figured out what was happening she made a fast emergency landing and she and her student jumped out and ran as a Japanese Zero strafed them and the airplane. (He missed both of them)

Other than that, none of them saw combat and they were restricted to CONUS.

Anyway, it was interesting digging through aviation history and finding out little tidbits here and there about people that followed their passion. In this case women back in the Dark ages that wanted to enter a male dominated field. 

When you think about it for a minute I'd have comfortably flown with any one of them because they were checked out to the same standard as their male counterparts and in many cases held to a higher standard because they had to overcome predjudice.

These days over the past several years I've been carted all over the country in various aircraft and encountered a few woman pilots and thought nothing of it. The last one I flew with I spoke with at DTW. Interesting woman and she had learned to fly 'the hard way' meaning she gave lessons, hauled freight and finally got into a regional airline and worked her way into the major leagues. IIRC (I may be wrong) she was flying for Delta when I met her.

Quite some time ago I watched a special on WASP pilots and there was one that was still active in aviation at a very ripe old age. IIRC she was in some program giving underprivileged kid flight lessons which I can see the point of why they were doing it. Maybe I'll get into that one later.

Anyway, someone asked her what her favorite airplane was and halfway through the question she interrupted the questioner and answered "P-51 Mustang!"

I can sure see that because pilots always want to fly the biggest and fastest airplane there is and this provided these pilots their dreams.

These women were not a part of the military, the WASP pilots were civilians as were members of the Military Airlift Command. Much later the WASPs got veteran status. Looking at things, a lot of them wanted to be commissioned as pilots but from my point of view, they probably had it better as civilians.

I would imagine that had they been commissioned that a number of them would have been scooped up by ranking officers to be their personal pilots to show off with and spent their careers bored to tears. MAC pilots were civvies, also and because they were civvies were not prone to anywhere close to the military crap they would have been had they been servicemen. 

In fact the logisticians wanted them to stay civilian just so they couldn't be shanghaii'd into military chores by ranking officers. I can picture some poor bastaard that had flown all over hell and was finally getting a good night's sleep only to be roused by some horse's ass colonel that wanted him to go out and pick up cigarette butts because 'the General's coming!'.   

God only knows what kind of crap those women would have had to deal with had they been active military.

As I write this I recall seeing something in the SF Bay area memorializing Maggie Gee, another Chinese WASP. It's fuzzy to say the least and it may have been a pronze plaque somewhere or maybe a picture in SFO or OAK. For the life of me I swear I've seen something but I can't remember what. Truth is, when when I was going or coming to and from work I was pretty preoccupied.

Here's a picture of Libby Gardener and she sure looks like a cool chick that loves what she's doing.

 

To find out why the blog is pink just cut and paste this: http://piccoloshash.blogspot.com/2009/12/my-feminine-side-blog-stays-pink.html NO ANIMALS WERE HARMED IN THE WRITING OF TODAY'S ESSAY