The experience she gained at Avenger Field was more than she could have hoped for. Within two weeks of arrival she was flying solo in a PT-19A, a 175-horsepower open-cockpit training airplane that cruised along at ninety miles per hour. Her instructor insisted she double-check her safety belt before each takeoff, and it was not long before Betty learned how important his advice was. One morning as she stood in line waiting for her turn to fly and memorizing a page from her navigational textbook, a PT-19A taxied down the runway. As Betty glanced up at it, she did a double take. The instructor was sitting in the rear cockpit seat, but the front cockpit was empty! The woman who had gone up in the plane just fifteen minutes before had vanished. Only the earphones dangling over the edge of the cockpit gave any hint she had been there.
Betty looked around in a panic. Other women gasped at the sight. What had happened to their fellow pilot? The instructor climbed out of the airplane and jumped to the ground. “It’s always a good idea to double-check your safety belt,” he said dryly. “This woman didn’t, and she fell out while doing a spin.”
Betty’s heart raced. This could have happened to any of them.
“The good thing is, she kept her wits about her and remembered to pull the ripcord on her parachute. She’ll be fine,” the instructor added, obviously enjoying the shock and suspense he had created.
The pilot was fine, just as the instructor had said. But it was only a few weeks later that another incident occurred, and this time it did not have such a happy ending. The basic training phase of their program had finished, and the women had moved on to instrument and night flying. One woman from Betty’s bay was scheduled for a night flying session. After dinner she climbed into a BT-13 aircraft. Betty happened to be walking by and listened as the 450-horsepower engine throbbed into motion. Everything sounded normal, and Betty did not give it a second thought. However, the plane never returned to Avenger Field, and its burned wreckage was found in a cattle pasture at daybreak the following morning. Both the instructor and the pilot were killed in the crash.
As a result of the accident, Betty vowed to be even more careful while flying and to diligently keep her eyes on the goal of learning all she could about flying aircraft under various conditions. She also thought more about missionary work and how her flying might help. One day she decided to write down her thoughts on the subject and submit them to Power, a magazine for teenagers published by Scripture Union Press.
Betty thought for a long time about what to say and in the end started her article with a brief description of what she did each day. She followed it by saying: “Why do I want to fly? Probably for the same reason hundreds of you would like to, but mainly because I am looking forward to being a missionary and think flying is going to be very useful in the work of spreading the message of Christ….”
The article was published along with a photo of Betty in her olive-green coveralls. Little did she know that these words would begin a chain of events that would define the rest of her life. An editor from His, InterVarsity Christian Fellowship’s magazine, read her article and asked her to write an article for the magazine about what she hoped to do when the war was over. The article was published in late spring 1943.
As the hot West Texas summer settled over Avenger Field, the pace of training heated up. By now the women had advanced to flying the AT-6 Texan, an advanced single-engine training airplane. It was the first plane Betty had flown with retractable landing gear, and its six-hundred-horsepower engine allowed her to cruise along at 145 miles per hour. Betty loved the throb of the powerful engine and practiced landings and takeoffs until she could do them perfectly every time.
The threat of an unsatisfactory test flight hung over Betty as it did all the women in the training program. When a pilot performed an unsatisfactory test flight, she was handed a pink form with a large “U” for unsatisfactory stamped across it. The pilot was then given a second chance to prove she could perform the particular procedure. This flight was called the E-ride. The “E” stood for elimination. If a pilot failed the second test, she was dismissed from the program and within a few hours had packed her belongings and left the base. At times Betty and her fellow pilots would line up for roll call, only to find someone was not there. The pilot had washed out on the E-ride and left, too humiliated to even say good-bye. This created a constant tension on base: Exams had to be passed in all subjects, and every flying technique had to be perfected in only six months.
With all the work involved, time flew by, and before Betty knew it, it was September 1943, and graduation. Graduation day was particularly hot, so hot that the tarmac stuck to Betty’s boots as she marched in formation to the quadrangle. She, like all the other eighty-five graduating pilots, was dressed in the unofficial Women’s Flying Training Detachment uniform—wide-legged khaki pants, short-sleeved white shirt, and khaki boatcap. The band struck up as class 43-W-5 stood to attention for inspection.
Keeping her head facing forward and as motionless as possible, Betty scanned the makeshift bleachers to her right and left. She knew many of the other women had their parents and siblings in the crowd, but Betty’s family was not there. It surprised her to feel a lump in her throat. She had been so busy with her final exams that she hadn’t had time to think about what graduation would be like without anyone she loved looking on.
Soon the speeches began. Captain Elmer Riley, the flight school director, stood to praise those who had made it through the program. He talked about how reliable the women were, how he thought they worked harder and were more responsible than the men, especially when it came to buzzing the nearby towns in their airplanes! Everyone laughed. Jacqueline Cochran was the last person to speak. She told the women pilots how proud she was of them and pointed out that although they could have left at any time, only 42 of the original 130 women had washed out. This was a one-third dropout rate, no higher than the men, who did not have the choice of leaving simply because they’d had enough.
The sun continued to beat down as Jacqueline Cochran finished her speech. Then as each woman’s name was called, the women walked up the concrete ramp to the dais to receive their wings and diploma. Jacqueline Cochran welcomed each of them as a fully fledged WASP, or member of the Women Airforce Service Pilots, as the Women’s Flying Training Detachment was now called.
As the silver wings with W 5 on a shield in the center were pinned onto her shirt, Betty thought about the future. She and two of her roommates, Ann Baumgartner, who would go on to become the first woman to fly a jet airplane, and Carol Jones, had been posted to Camp Davis in North Carolina. It was not until the three of them had arrived at Camp Davis a week later that they learned why they had been sent there. In July twenty-five Women Airforce Service Pilots from the previous class in Houston had been assigned to the camp. Betty was being added to the group as an extra pilot, while Ann Baumgartner and Carol Jones were replacing two of the WASPs who had been killed in flying accidents. Jacqueline Cochran had investigated both crashes, and although her report was classified, rumor was that sugar had been found in at least one of the crashed airplanes’ fuel tanks. Most people thought there was probably a man or group of men on base who resented the idea of using women pilots, though no one was ever charged with sabotage.
Upon their arrival at Camp Davis, the three women were allowed thirty minutes to settle in before they had to report for their first briefing. The room they were assigned to was much like the one at Avenger Field, and Betty guessed that the rooms were probably the same on every military base across the United States.
Betty was putting her clothes in a locker when she glanced out the window. Two men were walking past the barracks. One was short and blond. The other was tall and had reddish brown hair. Betty’s mouth dropped open when she saw him. She dashed out the door to catch up with the men. She could hardly believe her eyes. “Bill!” she yelled. “What on earth are you doing here?”
The tall man turned to look at her, a stunned look on his face as he laid eyes on his twin sister. Betty had only a few minutes to question him, but she found out that Bill had just been assigned to Camp Davis for an officers’ antiaircraft gunnery course. The two of them promised to find each other at dinner that night, and with a huge smile on her face, Betty hurried off to join Ann Baumgartner and Carol Jones for their briefing.
Before the end of the day, Betty knew exactly what her job was going to entail. The job had three parts, all aimed at giving the men on the base ways to practice fighting aircraft. The first part of the job required Betty to fly her plane along specially coded routes while radar operators on the ground tracked the plane so they could give its exact location at any given moment. The second part of the job involved flying over the base at night, allowing the men to practice their searchlight techniques and get the feel for how to spotlight enemy aircraft flying overhead under the cover of darkness. It was the third part of the job that boggled Betty’s mind the most. She would pull a large fabric target behind her plane while the men on the ground who were training to use antiaircraft guns would practice their aim by shooting at the target. This target practice sounded fine until Betty learned they would be using live ammunition. She only hoped their aim was good.
Chapter 5
Higher Than She’d Ever Been Before
Betty’s first target-towing flight turned out to be more eventful than she could have imagined. After taking off in a Lockheed B-34 bomber, a large canvas target flapping on the end of a cable behind the plane, Betty climbed to two thousand feet. As she did so, a male officer sent to check her out on her first flight in the aircraft dozed in the copilot’s seat beside her. Betty wasn’t sure whether his actions showed complete confidence in her flying ability or complete contempt for her as a woman pilot. She suspected the latter, as most of the men at Camp Davis seemed to resent the women pilots of the WASP.
At two thousand feet, Betty leveled off the airplane. As she proceeded to make a pass over the gunnery range where the antiaircraft gunners were practicing, shells began to burst around the Lockheed bomber. Betty was frightened. This was her first flight towing a target, and she had no idea whether or not this was normal. As she was debating whether to wake the officer sleeping next to her and ask him whether or not it was normal, a shell exploded so close to the plane that in a split second, the officer went from sleeping to sitting bolt upright.
“What was that?” he yelled.
“Shells are exploding all around us. Is that normal?” Betty asked.
“Normal, normal!” the officer spluttered. “Some fool down there is aiming right at us and not the target! What are they trying to do, shoot us down?” With that he began barking orders over the radio to the ground, and soon the shelling stopped.
Betty made several more runs over the antiaircraft gunnery range, but they were less eventful, with the gunners this time aiming and shooting at the canvas target trailing behind the Lockheed bomber.
The weeks rolled by, and although Betty had no more close calls, she was always careful when she flew. Her superiors must have taken note, because early one morning in January 1944, a messenger arrived at Betty’s barracks.
“I have orders for Elizabeth Greene,” the messenger said, handing Betty an official-looking envelope.
Betty thanked the messenger and sat down to read the orders. She was being reassigned to Wright Field in Dayton, Ohio, to be involved in the aeronautical research division. Betty laid the orders down and wondered what aeronautical research might be. She had no idea. As she pondered, her friend Ann Baumgartner burst into the room.
