El Wellington rolled to a stop at an airfield in East Anglia, and the ground crew went looking for its pilot. They would not believe it was the young woman who had climbed down from the cockpit. “They actually went inside the aeroplane and searched it,” Mary Ellis recalled. There was nobody else to find. She had flown the bomber there alone.

Between October 1941 and the end of the war, Ellis delivered about 1,000 aircraft of 76 types for the Air Transport Auxiliary (ATA), the civilian service that ferried military aircraft from factories and repair depots to the RAF. Some 400 were Spitfires and 47 were Wellingtons. She had no radio, only a map, a compass and a stopwatch.

She lived to 101, modest to the last about what she had done. Hers is also the story of the Attagirls, the women of the ATA who kept Britain’s squadrons supplied with aircraft while parts of the aviation press insisted they had no business in a cockpit.

A farmer’s daughter from Oxfordshire

Mary Wilkins was born on 2 February 1917 at Leafield in Oxfordshire, into a farming family that lived close to the RAF airfields at Bicester and Port Meadow. “I was interested in aeroplanes from almost the year dot,” she said. As a child she was given a pleasure flight with a visiting flying circus, paid for by her father. “I think that sealed my fate forever.”

As a teenager she took flying lessons at Witney and earned her licence, then flew for pleasure until the war ended civilian flying in September 1939. Two years later she heard an appeal for women pilots on BBC radio. Not everyone approved. The Aeroplane magazine had fumed in 1940 that women should “take on work more befitting their sex instead of encroaching on a man’s occupation.”

“Girls flying aeroplanes was almost a sin at that time,” Ellis remembered. She applied anyway, proved herself in a Tiger Moth at Hatfield and joined the ATA in October 1941, aged 24. Further training followed at the RAF’s Central Flying School on Moth, Hart and Hind biplanes.

The Attagirls of Hamble

The ATA had been set up at the start of the war, with its headquarters at White Waltham in Berkshire, so that RAF pilots could be spared for combat. It took the people the services would not: too old, not fit enough, or women. With its one-armed and one-eyed pilots, it was nicknamed “Ancient and Tattered Airmen”. Pauline Gower, a pilot since 1930, was asked to organise a women’s section, and the first eight women reported on 1 January 1940, cleared only for Tiger Moths.

Gower pushed for more. Women first flew Hurricanes in July 1941 and Spitfires a month later, and from 1943 they were paid the same as men of equal rank, the first time the British government had accepted equal pay for equal work in an organisation under its control. Fewer than 170 women ever flew for the ATA, roughly one pilot in eight. They were nicknamed the Attagirls.

Ellis was posted to No. 15 Ferry Pool at Hamble, near Southampton, which in September 1941 had become one of only two all-women ferry pools in Britain. She spent almost all of her ATA service there. The aircraft factories around Southampton were on the doorstep, and by the ATA Museum’s count she ferried 403 Spitfires, 77 of them from Eastleigh. “We were kept very busy and would fly every day for a fortnight, and then we were allowed two days off,” she said.

Nobody knew the day’s work in advance. “We never knew when we went to work in the morning what we were going to fly, and where we were going to fly to,” she said. On D-Day, 6 June 1944, her logbook records a Spitfire from Hamble to Oxfordshire, a ride back in a Fairchild Argus and another Spitfire to Gloucestershire, according to Hampshire Life.

BBC London interviews Mary Ellis, then 101, in February 2018 about joining the ATA and ferrying Spitfires and bombers (the video’s title repeats the ‘last surviving’ claim the ATA Museum disputed).

“He promptly fell off the aeroplane”

Her first Spitfire delivery became a favourite story. As she sat ready to go, the mechanic on the wing asked how many of them she had flown. “And I said, ‘I haven’t flown one at all yet, this is the first one’. And he promptly fell off the aeroplane!” she recalled. “Fortunately I made the perfect take off.”

The Spitfire remained her favourite. “The Spitfire was just like a dancing fairy,” she said. She loathed the amphibious Walrus, which, the ATA Museum records, she said “wobbled across the sky with a mind of its own” and “must have been designed by R J Mitchell on a bad day”.

Every delivery was flown by eye. The aircraft were unarmed and the airwaves were kept clear for the RAF, so ATA pilots navigated with a map, a compass and a stopwatch, and carried Pilots Notes, a two-ring book of small cards with the essentials for each type. Once cleared on a class of aircraft, a pilot could be sent to fly any type in it, even one she had never seen. “You’d get out of a Tiger Moth into a Wellington bomber and then into a Spitfire,” Ellis said.

In 1943 she moved up to Class 4, the advanced twins, adding the Mosquito, el Hudson and the Wellington to her logbook. Her types eventually ranged from Mustango fighters to twin-engined Baltimore bombers. All 47 of her Wellingtons she flew solo.

Fog, flak and friends who did not come back

The work was dangerous. Ellis was shot at over Bournemouth, possibly by friendly fire, and once, landing in fog, met another Spitfire landing from the opposite direction. She crash-landed a Spitfire whose undercarriage had jammed. “I just knew that I had to do something before the engine blew up. One didn’t get excited or anything else. It’s just a part of the job of coping with an aeroplane.” Over the New Forest her engine stopped altogether. “I circled round and suddenly saw a small place in the forest… practice made perfect and I did land without an engine.”

Others were less lucky, and the biggest killer was the weather, not the Luftwaffe. Counts of the ATA’s wartime dead range from 143 to 174 aircrew, and 14 or 15 of them were women. The most famous, Amy Johnson, had vanished over the Thames Estuary in an Airspeed Oxford on 5 January 1941, nine months before Ellis joined. In 1944 Ellis lost her friend Dora Lang. “I missed her terribly,” she said. “And for two days I was not allowed to fly – I didn’t want to. But after that one realised, well, there is a war on, we must get on with our jobs. And we did.”

From Spitfires to the Meteor

In the summer of 1945, according to the ATA Museum, Ellis became one of only two ATA women to ferry the RAF’s first jet, the Meteorito Gloster. She had no special training, she said, beyond a warning to “watch the fuel gauges, because it goes from full to empty in 40 minutes”. She was one of the last women still flying for the ATA when it was disbanded on 30 November 1945, with some 1,100 hours logged, and she carried on ferrying for the RAF for several months.

She then became personal pilot to a businessman friend of the family who farmed on the Isle of Wight. When he bought Sandown airfield he made her its managing director, and she ran Sandown Airport from 1950 to 1970, a job that has often seen her described as Europe’s first female air commandant. She founded the Isle of Wight Aero Club and hired a former ATA colleague, Vera Strodl, as chief flying instructor. Flight magazine, visiting in 1951, called Sandown a “woman pilots’ Utopia”.

In 1961 she married Don Ellis, a fellow pilot, and they made their home beside the runway. He died in 2009. She stayed on, and at 101 was still driving herself to the shops every day.

The one Spitfire Mary Ellis signed

Of all the aircraft she delivered, only one carries her name. On 15 September 1944 she flew Spitfire Mk VIII MV154 from Southampton to RAF Brize Norton, a 25-minute trip, and at the end of it signed the cockpit with her maiden name, Wilkins, and the letters ATA. “I flew about 1,000 aeroplanes during the war and that Spitfire was the only one I signed. The only one,” she said. “I suppose it was a romantic mood. I was thinking some handsome RAF chap might be fighting, you know, and suddenly see my name and contact me. It never happened.”

MV154 was crated and shipped to Australia, where it was stored and never saw action. It survived, and by 2017 was based at Bremgarten in Germany with its owner, Maxi Gainza, wearing the wartime markings of No. 145 Squadron. The 2018 documentary Spitfire, in which Ellis was interviewed, ends with her reunited with the aircraft and signing it once more.

Shortly before her 100th birthday in February 2017, she was back in a Spitfire herself. Matt Jones of the Boultbee Flight Academy took her up from Goodwood in a two-seater, with MV154 flying alongside, and handed her the controls. “Wizard, this is wizard!” she called over the intercom. Jones said the 99-year-old held 3,000ft for ten minutes without gaining or losing a foot, and found her way along the West Sussex coast by eye before telling him: “Goodwood on the nose, you have control…”

Older than the RAF

Recognition came late, but it came. In November 2016 she and fellow ATA pilot Joy Lofthouse were honoured at the Festival of Remembrance at the Royal Albert Hall, and that year she published her memoir, A Spitfire Girl, written with Melody Foreman. A plaque at RAF Brize Norton followed in 2017, then the Freedom of the Isle of Wight in 2018 and, that May, an RAF100 reception at 10 Downing Street.

She died at home in Sandown on 24 July 2018, aged 101, about a fortnight after attending the London premiere of Spitfire. Two Battle of Britain pilots, Tom Neil and Geoffrey Wellum, had died earlier that month.

Several reports called Mary Ellis the last surviving female pilot of the Second World War. She was not, and the ATA Museum said so bluntly, calling the claim “fake news”. Other ATA women were still alive, among them Eleanor Wadsworth in Britain, Jaye Edwards in Canada and the American Nancy Stratford.

The head of the RAF, Air Chief Marshal Sir Stephen Hillier, remembered her “proudly reminding us at RAF100 events that she was older than the RAF itself!” The Red Arrows pilot Mike Ling was among those who paid tribute.

Red Arrows pilot Mike Ling’s tribute on 25 July 2018, the day after Mary Ellis died.

Mary Ellis had already put the Attagirls’ legacy into one sentence. “When women pilots cease to become news, the battle of equality will have been won,” she wrote in 2016. At her 100th birthday party she summed up the Spitfire even more simply: “I think it’s a symbol of freedom.”

Sources: Wikipedia: Mary Ellis (pilot), Air Transport Auxiliary, Pauline Gower, Amy Johnson, Joy Lofthouse and Spitfire (2018 film), accessed 2 October 2026; Air Transport Auxiliary Museum, Maidenhead Heritage Centre, July 2018; BBC News, 9 October 2015, 2 February 2017, 14 March 2017, 18 January 2018 and 26 July 2018; The Guardian, 26 July 2018 and 29 July 2018; Isle of Wight County Press, 26 July 2018; The Independent, 26 July 2018; Daily Mail, 26 July 2018; Express, 29 July 2018; Mail on Sunday, 4 February 2017; The Telegraph, 16 November 2019; defense.info, 26 July 2018 (quoting The Telegraph, 2015); Hampshire Life, 11 August 2020; Liberation Route Europe, ATA Memorial, Hamble; Imperial War Museums, photograph TR 34; Mary Ellis with Melody Foreman, A Spitfire Girl (Frontline Books, 2016)