This is just one of the untold stories of the heroic young women who, with little training, flew thousands of aircraft across the country and risked their lives to keep British planes in the air during the Second World War. Now, the many achievements of these women – and the remarkable courage they showed, often before resuming their roles as housewives in post-war Britain – will be celebrated for the first time in an upcoming exhibition at Biggin Hill Memorial Museum. Items on display for the first time will include the diary, training manual and dark blue uniform of decorated fighter pilot Dolores “Jackie” Moggridge, a pioneering aviator who – like many women who wanted to fly – joined the Women’s Auxiliary Air Force during the war. burst out. In July 1940, aged just 18, he enlisted in the Auxiliary Air Transport Service (ATA) and after just two weeks of military training, began ferrying hundreds of aircraft where they were needed for the Battle of Britain. “She was the youngest ATA pilot to fly in the second world war and quite a pioneering woman,” said Kate Edwards, director at the museum, which honors the famous Second World War fighter station and RAF airfield at Biggin Hill in district of London. Bromley. “She flew planes up and down the country – she flew 82 different types of warplanes in total and after the war she became the first female airline captain to carry passengers on scheduled flights.” Some men “freaked out” whenever they encountered a female pilot like Mogridge during the war, Edwards said. In one memorable mission, Moggridge thought her plane was going to be hit because just as it landed everyone outside suddenly ran for cover. “Everything turned out to be [male] the pilots were sunbathing in their underwear.” The challenges faced by women like Mogridge were extraordinary because ATA pilots were not taught to fly all the different types of warplanes they were expected to carry. Dora Lange died in 1944 while delivering a de Havilland Mosquito Mk VI airplane to an airfield in Hampshire. Photo: © IWM Instead, after some “very limited training” in the air, they were given a small book known as “the ferry pilot’s notes”, which contained all the technical data they needed to know to fly each different plane – and told to study. “That was all they had. They might be flying four or five different types of aircraft a day following these notes.” An ATA pilot, Lettice Curtis, who became the first woman to fly a four-engined bomber, flew two light aircraft, a Spitfire, two medium bombers and a Stirling heavy bomber in just 24 hours. “He threw it all in one day, with just those ‘ferry pilot notes,’” Edwards said. The women were constantly forced to refer to the notes to figure out how to use the confusion of flying instruments they would find on the different planes. “The throttles, the gauges, all those instruments on a plane – they had to work it out as they were flying or read the notes before they took off.” A male member of the RAF once made a complaint about Mogridge after noticing her reading while flying the plane she was on. “He is reported to have said, ‘It’s been a terrible time and I can’t believe that not only was a woman dropping me off here, but she was reading a book.’ According to the report, Moggridge’s response was: “Oh, no, I wasn’t reading a novel. These were my ATA notes. I hadn’t flown in this type of plane before’ – so her former passenger ‘almost got thrown’. Moggridge went on, in 1953, to become one of the first women to earn RAF wings and died aged 81 in 2004. The fascinating ‘book’ she was reading on that flight – her own treasured copy of the ‘notes of the ferry pilot’. – will be exhibited for the first time at the exhibition. During the war, ATA pilots flew 309,000 aircraft across Britain, flying a total of 147 different types of aircraft. One in 10 of them were women. These women played a vital role in the war effort, Edwards said, “and they did it without radios, without flying instrument instructions, at the mercy of the British weather, often in an airplane they had never seen. And in those days, no radio, you were just up, that was it. You were alone.” Female pilots’ reliance on “ferry notes” may explain why Lang and Harrington died so tragically while trying to land. “The notes would tell you the stall speed for each aircraft – so the speed at which you would stall. Maybe they hadn’t received that data,” Edwards said. The two women are buried next to each other, just as they spent their last flight. They had no spouses or children to mourn their deaths, Edwards said – they died too young. And since they didn’t get a medal or die in a blaze of glory, their sacrifice has so far been largely forgotten, Edwards said. “Like many ordinary people killed during the war, their story has been left untold. So far.”
