More WASP Stories Honoring Women Pilots

This was sent to me by my friend Jay Buckley. I can't improve on the way he tells the story of three WASP lady pilots that he knew. The stories are funny and reveal the tough character of these women.

"I knew three gals that were WASP's.
Billie Jo Reid was the wife of one of the original owners of the McDonald franchises in Denver. As I believe he had 19 outlets. Billie Jo flew in several 99 races sponsored by her husband Carl. She also flew the company King Air.

The other two were Pat Sullivan and Betty Clark. After the war they started a crop dusting business in Steamboat and moved to Rifle, CO. Betty was from Rifle and there was more business there and in Grand Junction. They operated out of both areas.

Betty did most of the flying and Pat ran the loading, office operations and field scouting. In 1970 I took my plane down to help Betty out for few days, it turned into an all summer contract flying both out of Rifle and Grand Junction.

Betty and I flew back up to Rifle one evening as Pat had said we had some alfalfa fields to scout and spray. These were big fields, 40 acres. The fields in Junction were 5 and 10 acre patches, yank and bank type, power lines and houses.

We met the farmer out in the field that evening to inspect the insect damage. There was plenty of evidence of alfalfa weevil feeding and damage. Pat came running up to us and showed the farmer a handful of weevil. The farmer took one look and said they were all dead, got in his pickup and drove away.

Pat had collected some weevil from a pasture near the airport and put them in an aspirin bottle. Wanting to convince the farmer he had a problem, she shook the weevil out in her hand to show him. Sure enough they were dead, the aspirin had killed them. We lost the job.

Betty and Pat have both passed away. I'm not sure about Billie Jo, I haven't seen her since 1976 and her health was not good then.

One more story about Betty. A United DC-4 was flying from Denver to Grand Junction and lost an engine somewhere east of Rifle and another engine was miss firing so the pilot elected to set the plan down at the Rifle airport. The runway was pretty short but he got in stopped before going off the west end.

A maintenance crew came in from Denver to access the damage and how they were going to get the plane out of there. The consensus was the runway was too short so they were going to have to disassemble the plane and either truck it back to Denver or on to Grand Junction and reassemble the plane there. Trucking it out of there was going to be a real challenge. This was before the intra state highway l-70.

Betty and the mechanics sat around for a bit that evening having a toddy or two and Betty told them if they would replace the two engines they could fly the "damn thing" out of there. We after many phone calls to United in Denver it was decide it may be possible.

The two engines were replaced and a crew showed up to fly the plane to Grand Junction. After walking the runway, doing some calculations the crew said there is no way they would try to fly the plane out even with minimum fuel. There were more calls to Denver between the mechanics, pilots and operations explaining the situation.

Betty had about all she could stand and said she would fly the "damn thing" out of there for $500 and she didn't need a crew only someone to raise and lower the flaps and the gear and if they couldn't find someone she could even do that.

It was agreed to give it a try. They pushed the plane to the far end of the east edge of the runway. The main gear was just on the runway, most of the fuselage was overhanging a ravine at the end of the runway.

Betty and one of the mechanics that volunteered stood on the brakes while she ran the engines up to maximum power. The plane was literally jumping up and down. She released the brakes and roared down the runway. About two thirds of the runway, the plane was air borne. The flight was uneventful to Grand Junction.

A few days later Betty received a phone call and a letter from the CAA, the predecessor to the FAA, about the flight. She wasn't rated in a DC-4, inadequate crew members and so on. She hung up on the guy and filed the letter where we filed most of the letters from the feds. Betty had ferried B-17's so she was no stranger to four engine aircraft.

Sorry about the rambling Rob, but those were three gals I real admired.

Jay"

Honoring Women Pilots this Week

Hazel Ying Lee, American Hero
Though she served her country in WWII, a Portland cemetery initially refused her family a burial plot because she was Asian.

WASP Pilot, Aviation Pioneer

Name in English: Hazel Ying Lee

Name in Chinese: 李月英

Name in Pinyin: Lǐ Yuèyīng

Gender: Female

Birth Year: 1912 in Portland, Oregon, U.S.A.

Died: 1944

Profession (s): Military Pilot
Education: Commerce High School, High School Diploma, 1929; Pilot’s license, 1932
Awards: 2004, Oregon Aviation Hall of Honor Member, Evergreen Aviation and Space Museum
Contribution (s): During a time of rampant anti-Chinese bias and discrimination against women, Hazel Ying Lee defied the odds as one of the first Chinese American women to get a pilot’s license and later the first to fly for the U.S. Army. When she obtained her pilot’s license in 1932 only one percent of American pilots were women and only a handful of them were Chinese American women.

In 1943, Lee became the first Chinese American woman to join the “Women Airforce Service Pilots” (WASP) program created to replace male pilots needed in combat with women. By American law and custom of the time, women weren’t allowed to hold military jobs that could potentially involve combat, although quite a few military nurses did come under enemy fire during World War II. Previously, Lee had volunteered to join the Chinese Air Force twice to help the war effort and to join her husband already serving with them. Although the Chinese Air Force needed pilots, Lee was rejected each time because she was a woman.

Lee was one of the first women to pilot fighter aircraft for the U.S. Army under the WASP program, but work for the WASP program was often dangerous and exhausting with seven-day work weeks. Female pilots like Lee delivered military aircraft from their manufacturers to airfields across North America. Delivering aircraft that were fresh from the assembly line, WASP pilots were often the first to discover malfunctions. Lee died in 1944 when her plane collided on a runway with a malfunctioning plane whose radio had failed. Both planes had accidentally been directed to land on the same runway at the same time. Hazel Lee was one of the last of the 38 WASP’s killed during the war.

After Lee’s death, the Lee family went through a lengthy but ultimately successful battle with a Portland cemetery that refused to bury any Asians. Lee was laid to rest in a non-military funeral, since WASP pilots were classified as civilians during WWII, and did not receive military benefits or military funerals. Lee and other WASP pilots would not be recognized with military status until 1979.

Lee showed that Chinese American women could compete as equals in aviation with any man. She was a woman who knew what she wanted and chased her dreams to fly even at the cost of giving her life for her country.
Written by AsianWeek Staff Report · Filed Under Chinese American Heroes, Features
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Diana Barnato Walker, Acclaimed Pilot, Dies at 90

Diana Barnato Walker set a speed record as a pilot in 1963.

By John F. Burns
Monday, May 12, 2008

LONDON: Diana Barnato Walker, an heiress to a South African diamond mining fortune who took up flying in the 1930s and became a celebrated aviator as one of a group of women who delivered new fighters and bombers to combat squadrons in World War II, died on April 28. She was 90.

Her son, Barney Walker, said that Walker died in a hospital near her sheep farm in Surrey, and that the cause was pneumonia.

Walker, a granddaughter of Barney Barnato, a co-founder of the De Beers mining company in Johannesburg, was 18 years old when she discovered her calling in 1936. Seeking a break from the social whirl of a young debutante in London, she paid £3 for a flying lesson in a Tiger Moth biplane at the Brooklands Motor Racing Circuit and never turned back.

In 1941, after serving as a nursing auxiliary with the British expeditionary force, which had been driven from France by the German invasion the year before, she passed rigorous tests and became a member of what The Times of London described in 2005 as "the pluckiest sisterhood in military history," the women's arm of the Air Transport Auxiliary. Only a little over five feet tall, Walker often needed a special cushion to allow her to reach the controls of the aircraft she flew.

Known as the "Atagirls," the transport auxiliary pilots--108 by the war's end in 1945 -joined more than 500 male pilots in delivering many of the most renowned aircraft of the war to squadrons across Britain. Walker, like the other women in the group, flew Spitfire, Hurricane and Mustang fighters, as well as Wellington and Hampden bombers, though not heavy bombers; only male pilots were judged to have the physical strength to handle those.

Walker alone delivered 260 Spitfires during her four years in uniform, according to wartime records. In one month, September 1944, she delivered 33 aircraft of 14 types. Pilots were often asked to fly in poor weather, without instruments, without combat weaponry and frequently without radios.

A total of 16 women piloting the ferry runs were killed in the war, nearly one in six, a ratio that aviation historians say was worse than that suffered by the Royal Air Force's wartime fighter pilots.

Walker, who survived many brushes with death, wrote in her 1994 autobiography, "Spreading My Wings," that she owed her survival to a "guardian angel." Twice the unarmed planes she was flying came were attacked by German aircraft, and she emerged uninjured.

There were light moments. The incident that amused her most occurred when she tried aerobatic maneuvers in a Spitfire and found herself flying upside down, unable to right the aircraft. "While I was wondering what to do next, from out of my top overall pocket fell my beautifully engraved silver powder compact," she wrote. "It wheeled round and round the bubble canopy like a drunken sailor on a wall of death, then sent all the face powder over everything."

After she managed to right the plane and land, a "very tall and handsome" RAF pilot hopped onto the wing and told her that he and his fellow pilots had been told to expect "a very, very pretty girl" at the controls, but that "all I can see is some ghastly clown."
Born on Jan. 15, 1918, Diana Barnato Walker was the daughter of Woolf Barnato, a London-based financier who, as chairman of the Bentley car company, won the Le Mans 24-hour race in France three times in succession from 1928.

In 1942 she became engaged to a Battle of Britain fighter ace who later died in a Spitfire crash. In 1944, she married another decorated Spitfire pilot, Derek Walker, and flew alongside him, each in a Spitfire, to a honeymoon in Brussels. He was killed in a flying accident six months after the war ended in 1945. She subsequently began a 30-year relationship with Whitney Straight, an American-born graduate of Cambridge University who was a grand prix racing driver in the 1930s and a Battle of Britain fighter ace. Barney Walker, her survivor, is their son.

Diana Walker continued to fly after the war, when she flew her own light aircraft around Britain encouraging young women to take up careers in aviation through an organization known as the Women's Junior Air Corp. She bought the sheep farm in Surrey and became master of the local fox hunt.

In 1963, at the age of 45, she became the first British woman to fly faster than sound when she piloted a two-seat RAF Lightning fighter at a speed of 1,262 miles an hour over the North Sea. That made her, briefly, holder of the world air speed record for women; it was broken in 1964 by Jacqueline Cochran Odlum, one of more than a dozen American women who had flown with the Air Transport Auxiliary during the war.
In 1964, Odlum, flying an F-104G Starfighter, raised the record to 1,429 miles an hour.
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