One woman, 19-year-old Margot ‘Chilli’ Duhalde, spoke no English at all on arrival, yet went forth with the same sense of courageous daring. Four women from New Zealand determinedly paid their own passage in order to be part of history. Twenty-five enthusiastic and experienced female flyers from the USA joined the ATA in 1942. But without the combined efforts of the ATA’s 4,000 employees, the outcome of the war could have been very different.ĭuring the war the ATA earned itself the nickname Foreign Legion of the Air, with pilots coming from 28 different countries. In a sense, it was a backroom job, flying across the country, getting the planes to where they desperately needed to be. In time their numbers would swell to 168 out of a total of 1,245 ATA ferry pilots and engineers. It was a modest start, but within a few years this group of female flyers would be at the controls of fighter planes and four-engine bombers. In January 1940, eight female pilots ferried open-cockpit training planes (De Havilland Tiger Moths) in harsh wintry conditions from a muddy base at Hatfield, near the De Havilland factory, up to Scotland. The ATA, a civilian organisation whose pilots were principally tasked with ferrying new fighting machines from the factory to the RAF airfields, was being born just as war spread across Continental Europe. But female flyers? No thanks.īut war has the ability to be a great social leveler, and thanks to the efforts of the redoubtable Pauline Gower – an experienced commercial pilot and MP’s daughter – female pilots were about to take their place in the history of the Second World War and in Britain’s eventual victory. As war with Germany loomed, the RAF would desperately need increasing numbers of planes and pilots. Amy Johnson’s solo flight from Croydon to Australia had taken the world by storm, making flying a fashionable pursuit for wealthy women. When war broke out in 1939, the aviation industry was in its infancy only the well-to-do could even afford the luxury of travelling by plane. Here was an assignment like no other: meeting them, recording their histories, reliving, through their words, those turbulent, war-torn years when Britain’s skies rained destruction and the country’s future hung perilously in the balance. When I was asked to write The Female Few: Spitfire Heroines I interviewed five Air Transport Auxiliary (ATA) female pilots – the women who flew Spitfires and many other types of planes from factories to RAF squadrons during World War II.
Yet there was nothing, they insisted, remotely heroic about their exploits. Modest to a fault, these women faced danger, sudden death, serious injury or bereavement on an almost daily basis. They were just ‘doing their bit’ for their country. No, they told me again and again, there was nothing special about them.