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