Island Life Magazine Ltd December 2007/January 2008 | Page 33

FEATURE life It is not widely known that women were trained as pilots during the war, and played a vital part in the delivery of Hurricanes and Spitfires to airfields for active service. June Elford meets one former pilot who has never quite got over her love affair with flying Flying against all expectation By June Elford M ary Ellis’ love affair with flying started before the war when her father took her to Sir Allan Cobham’s air show at Hendon and she persuaded him to let her take a pleasure flight in an Avro 504. “From that moment I was hooked,” says Mary and after learning to fly at Witney near Oxford, by the time she was sixteen she had obtained her Flying Licence. So you can imagine her excitement in 1941 when she heard an appeal by the ATA on the radio for women pilots. She applied and was accepted after taking a flying test and told to report to Hatfield with a group of eight girls. They were trained to fly single fighters like Harvards, Hurricanes and Spitfires and later, when the Oxfords and Wellingtons were converted to twin types, all the other twin types in that class. After her basic training Mary was based Island Life - www.isleofwight.net at No. 15 Pool at Hamble, an all-women pool, and began to fly from aircraft factory aerodromes to airfields anywhere in Britain. In all, the ATA delivered 308,567 aircraft of 122 different types throughout the UK and Northern Ireland and Mary’s total (she calls it ‘modest’) was about 1,000 of 76 different types of military aircraft including 400 Spitfires. She was also one of only two girls to fly a Meteor jet at the end of the war when her sole briefing for the flight was to warn her that in 45 minutes the fuel would run out! The ATA pilots’ job was dangerous – 143 of them were lost during the war in flying accidents including fourteen women – and the only navigational aids the pilots had were maps, a compass and a stop watch. Flying planes from factories to RAF and FAA airfields in open cockpits was cold and extremely uncomfortable and with no radio facilities, the pilots couldn’t be told about a change in the weather or warned where t