Pioneering female aviators delivered planes wherever they were needed in the second world war – armed with just a notebook
Photograph: Leonard McCombe/Getty ImagesPhotograph: Leonard McCombe/Getty ImagesThey flew together, died together, and are buried side by side. First officer Dora Lang and Flight Engineer Janice Harrington were killed on 2 March 1944 while delivering a de Havilland Mosquito Mk VI plane to an airfield in Hampshire. Their plane stalled as it approached the landing strip, and they crashed.
“She was the youngest ATA pilot to fly in the second world war and quite a groundbreaking woman,” said Kate Edwards, director at the museum, which commemorates the famous second world war fighter station and RAF airfield at Biggin Hill in the“She was flying planes up and down the country – she flew 82 different types of warplanes in total, and after the war she went on to become the first female airline captain to ferry passengers on scheduled flights.
Dora Lang died in 1944 while delivering a de Havilland Mosquito Mk VI plane to an airfield in Hampshire.Instead, after some “very limited training” in the air, they were handed 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 it. “That was all they had. They might be flying four or five different types of aircraft a day by following these notes.
A male member of the RAF once made a complaint about Moggridge after observing her reading while she was flying the plane he was on. “He reportedly said: ‘It was dreadful weather and I can’t believe not only was a woman flying me here, but she was reading a book’.” Over the course of the war, ATA pilots ferried 309,000 aircraft across Britain, flying 147 different types of planes in total. One in 10 of them were female.