Walking on Air (22 page)

Applicants for the school were required to be single or married to husbands in active military service, hold a private pilot's license or better, and have at least 120 flying hours.
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They would be chosen on the basis of their “attitude toward women's part in the war, physical fitness, previous flying experience, and willingness to serve where needed.”
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In return, they were promised “62 hours of flying, 216 hours of ground school instruction, 162 hours of flight instructors ground school, a hard eight hours of work a day for six days a week for 12 weeks, uniforms, food, and an enormous old southern colonial house for a dormitory.”
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Calling it a southern colonial was a bit grand. Phoebe acquired an old farmhouse near Nashville's Gillespie Field which she cleaned, painted and renovated into an army-style barracks. She begged blankets from the factory at the state penitentiary, commandeered some war-surplus cots, and set about hiring instructors. She immediately ran into the very shortage her school was seeking to overcome. Finding it impossible to get an instructor who could teach all the ground school classes she wanted to include (meteorology, aerial navigation, aircraft structure, aircraft engines, and civil air regulations), she had to hire five different instructors to teach in their particular areas of expertise.
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Ten students were selected from over 250 applicants. Six were chosen from Tennessee: Margaret Josephine Wakefield, a Vanderbilt graduate and teacher in Nashville Schools who had flying experience in six different types of aircraft; Martha E. Childress of Columbia, a recent Vanderbilt graduate who took her civilian pilot training there; Mary Elizabeth Pigg, another Vanderbilt University graduate and secretary with extensive experience in the Civil Air Patrol; Jennie Lou Gower of Murfreesboro, a former assembly line inspector for Vultee Aircraft; Lucille Biggs, a former school-teacher and employee of Gill Dove Airways in Martin, Tennessee; and Cora McDonald of Bristol, an aeronautical engineer who worked for Bristol Aircraft Company and had flown twelve types of planes. The others were Elizabeth Moody Hall of Lexington, Kentucky, daughter of missionaries to India and the wife of a military man, with 150 hours in her logbook; Helen Jean Johnston of Birmingham, Alabama, married to a major with the 127th Observation Squadron stationed in Tullahoma, Tennessee, had 300 logged flight hours; Dorothy Moselle Swain of Asheville, North Carolina, a ferrying pilot for Piper Aircraft; and Emma Jean Whittington of Hot Springs, who already held a ground instructor's rating.
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Speaking to the press on women's proper role in wartime aviation, Phoebe said,

The greatest contribution they can make to the all-out war effort is to prepare themselves for and accept jobs as teachers in the primary training of aviation pilots. It's hard work and it isn't a glamorous job, but women in America have never failed when they had to adapt themselves to meet emergencies. They will not fail today. Indeed, because of the high standards set up and their knowledge that they must be perfect to convince the skeptics, I feel that they will become the best instructors in aviation.
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Phoebe was particularly concerned that her trainees not be perceived by the press and the general public as frivolous or glamorous.

We need a new appraisal of women in war, particularly in aviation. The whole program of women in war work always gets distorted by excess publicity, until you can't see the jobs for the women, uniforms and window dressing. I'm eager to add here that it is not the fault of the women, either. The first women in the factories had to smear grease on their faces and pull their hair down to satisfy the art editors of the newspapers. Later, as each new and different job for women opened up, the photographers dressed it up and the writers elaborated upon it, until we hardly know today what the important jobs are.
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Trips to the beauty shop were discouraged and the women wore drab uniforms of khaki-gray trousers, a dark-brown coat, and a dark-brown overseas cap.
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The young women studied “under similar conditions of discipline and curricula” as that afforded in a regular army cadet training school.
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Their six-day-a-week schedule began when they were awakened by the clang of an old plantation bell at 6:45
AM
. They engaged in calisthenics on the lawn and a quick breakfast before their two-mile march in formation to the airport where they stayed until suppertime. Their days were filled with flight instruction, classroom instruction in aerodynamics, meteorology, navigation, and civil air regulations. Phoebe incorporated her ground servicemen's “mechanics helper” course into the curriculum, including engine overhaul and repair, and recovering wings and flight surfaces in the shop, to ensure her instructors could service and fix their own aircraft. After supper the women had study time for two hours before collapsing into bed.
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The drill continued, good weather and bad. When the Cumberland River flooded and marooned the school, Phoebe borrowed a boat and rowed her students to the airport.
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Phoebe was tough, demanding, and “definitely not one of the girls.”
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She held to very rigid rules and pushed her students hard because, she said, these women would be training men to fight and lives would depend upon their skills. “I want that instruction to be as perfect and tough as possible because the men's lives may depend on it. If we aren't tough with them, these women, they won't be tough on the men.”
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Moreover, Phoebe knew that, as women, her students would be held to higher standards than comparable men and that, as McDonald told them at their welcoming dinner, “Yours is a great responsibility. Whether or not you succeed or fail in this
course may prove the turning point for women in aviation in the United States.”
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While Phoebe always referred to her trainees as women, the press inevitably called them girls and remarked on their attractiveness. For example, one reporter reassured readers that the students' “good looks are above the average with blue eyes and brown hair prominent.”
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A
Washington Daily News
feature captioned a photograph of the women marching in formation in their dress uniforms as “Ten little girls from the Tennessee school.”
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An article featuring graduate Emma Hall in the
Atlanta Journal
called her “pert and pretty” under a headline reading “90-Pound Career Girl Teaches Navy Boys How to Fly Planes.”
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Each woman had logged a minimum of 120 hours before entering the school and each logged 165 additional hours or more before she graduated. Each qualified for a commercial pilot's license as well as qualifying as a pilot instructor. In addition, each had at least five ratings in the ground school subjects of meteorology, aerial navigation, aircraft structure, aircraft engines, and civil air regulations. In case of an emergency, Phoebe told the newspapers, any one of her students would be able to manage an airport.
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The ten women graduated with great ceremony 3 February 1943, as Phoebe Omlie stood proudly by. Gov. Prentice Cooper commended the graduates and the Tennessee Bureau of Aeronautics, saying that he could “imagine no more important work than that of training fighter pilots.”
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Then C. I. Stanton from the Civil Aeronautics Authority took the podium:

It is my opinion that, since women have always excelled in instructing and have done most of the teaching of our nation, this should be their natural function in aviation. Our problem is to give the 1,000,000 boys who will graduate into the draft each year flight training. I believe we should train at least 200,000 of them each year. To do that, we shall need at least 5,000 women instructors.
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The graduates were immediately in very high demand since few instructors were highly and broadly qualified. The Embry-Riddle School in Miami, Florida, wanted to hire the whole class, as did a school in Kansas City; other requests came in from Missouri, El Paso, New Orleans, Atlanta, and several others. Jackie Cochran tried to recruit the whole class for the WASPs.
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In the end, the women were assigned to various aviation training schools across the country where the CAA held contracts with the armed forces.

Tennessee Bureau of Aeronautics executive director Col. Herbert Fox celebrated the successful completion of the school as a model for a national initiative. “Our job was to prove that women can do flight instructing. It is now the job of the federal government to train them. I believe they intend to do that.”
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The Tennessee Bureau of Aeronautics and the Civil Aeronautics Authority asked Congress for a supplemental appropriation of $2.5 million to train 500 more women instructor pilots within six months with 400 more in training. About a month after the first class graduated, the House Appropriations Committee was hearing testimony on the bill in closed session.
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A year later, McDonald declared that, despite the apparent success of the Tennessee school whose graduates had by then trained an estimated 500 men and the eagerness of over 1,000 women pilots who had contacted his agency seeking training, there had been no action on the bill.
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Given discussions about the acute need for flight instructors, it is difficult to discern why the initiative was not funded, but it appears that a number of factors were involved. Among them was the bubbling controversy over the heavily funded women's ferry service, a discomfort by the military in having civilians train military pilots that was exacerbated by their reluctance to use women to train male pilots, and a rapidly dwindling evidence of need, due largely to stepped-up efforts by the military to provide and train flight instructors of their own.

As the closed hearings continued, some of the debate between the CAA and the military played out in the newspapers. While “private schools in [the] CAA program say they could put 1,000 women pilots to work,” the army was demonstrating great reluctance to use civilian training schools. The army announced that they would not use women flight instructors in the CAA schools for training their Army Air Force cadets. Further, in a point disputed by the CAA, the army contended that they had “several thousand enlisted men in reserve waiting to be trained as instructors in the Army's ‘continuing' training program.”
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Funding concerns had also arisen in the hearings. The TBA director Herbert Fox complained that the ferry service had been given funding priority even though the cost of training women as service pilots cost about $25,000 apiece while the bureau had trained women flight instructors for about $1,000 each.
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At bottom was the military's longtime skepticism of the value of civilian programs for flight training, a concern that affected congressional commitment and appropriations. Once the war began, the military, especially the army, more actively opposed civilian training and moved to undercut its effectiveness by building their own training facilities and staffing them
with military personnel.
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Apparently prompted by criticism that they had allowed thousands of qualified male flight instructors to be swept up in draft calls, the army aggressively moved to “reclaim” for the air forces those instructors who had been reassigned, inducted, or called to active duty in nonflying capacities. In short, before Congress could act in funding more women flight instructors to alleviate a shortage, the shortage, according to the army, no longer existed.
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Phoebe's job as senior operations supervisor with the War Training Service was abolished when the war ended. She was transferred to the lower-rated job of research liaison officer in the Administrative Office for Research.
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In that capacity, she worked on a variety of research projects for the CAA. One major study involved a survey of fatal air accidents resulting from stall conditions of aircraft. A stall occurs when the angle of the wing relative to the air traveling over it becomes too great to sustain lift and the wing stops flying, causing the aircraft to fall. The study concluded that about half of all fatal private flying accidents before 1945 resulted from stalls. The CAA's technical division subsequently devised several devices to serve as stall warnings, activating a horn or flashing light in the cockpit to warn pilots of an approaching stall. Though designed primarily for private aviation, these devices were critical additions to the safety equipment of all aircraft.
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In the years following the end of the war, the Civil Aeronautics Administration struggled to redefine its priorities among competing aviation interests, primarily those of the airlines, military aviation, and private pilots. This resulted in a good deal of chaos at the agency. Many personnel changes, some accompanied by charges of malfeasance and corruption, roiled the agency; budgets were held to wartime levels despite the increasing pressure to expand its responses to a burgeoning commercial sector.
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Still, at least for a time, the CAA saw its mission to support civil aviation as an important one. Given the large numbers of pilots trained during the war, the CAA anticipated a postwar boom in civil aviation. When the postwar market for private planes appeared to be stalled, Director Theodore P. Wright tried to determine the cause. Part of this investigation involved Phoebe's survey of the financial status of persons investing in aircraft at various age levels. Her data revealed that for the average individual the advantages of flying were only cost effective for trips over 100 miles, so it was impractical for a pilot to own a plane unless he used it frequently for long trips. Given this contingency, flying was rapidly becoming luxury recreation for the wealthy.
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