In early 1942, a woman in Washington, D.C. commuted to her office in Baltimore every day in her own aeroplane. Her husband mentioned it to his boss, Colonel William H. Tunner, who was scouring the country for pilots to deliver new aircraft from factories to air bases. Tunner had a conversation with her. By September that year, Nancy Harkness Love was commanding a new squadron of women ferry pilots for the US Army Air Forces.

The Women's Auxiliary Ferrying Squadron, the WAFS, was her idea, her recruiting and her command. Its pilots went on to fly almost every type in the Army's inventory, and Love herself became one of the first women to fly the Fortezza volante B-17. Yet outside aviation circles, her name is far less known than it should be.

The Flying Freshman

Hannah Lincoln Harkness, born in Houghton, Michigan in 1914, took her first flight at 16 and had her licence within a month. At Vassar she earned her commercial licence and made money flying fellow students around, picking up the nickname "The Flying Freshman." In the 1930s she flew for a Boston aviation company she ran with her husband, Robert Love, raced in the National Air Races, and worked as a test pilot, including on the tricycle landing gear that later became standard on most aircraft.

In May 1940, with war already raging in Europe, she wrote to Lieutenant Colonel Robert Olds at Air Corps headquarters. She had found 49 excellent women pilots, each with more than 1,000 hours, and proposed that they ferry aircraft from factories to bases. The Army's commanding general, Hap Arnold, turned the plan down.

Twenty-Eight Originals

Two years later the need was impossible to ignore. Tunner asked Love to write up a proposal for a women's ferrying unit. When his request to commission the women into the Women's Army Auxiliary Corps was refused, he made her Executive of Women Pilots on his staff. Within months she had recruited the pilots who became known as "the Originals," and from September 1942 they flew from New Castle Army Air Field in Delaware.

Love set strict rules from day one. She knew the programme would be judged harshly, and that any hint of scandal could end it.

Public support came from the very top. In her newspaper column My Day on 1 September 1942, First Lady Eleanor Roosevelt argued that this was not a time for women to be patient.

Bombers, Fighters and a Cancelled Crossing

By June 1943 Love commanded four WAFS squadrons, at Love Field in Texas, New Castle, Romulus in Michigan and Long Beach in California. On 5 August 1943 the WAFS merged with Jacqueline Cochran's training organisation to form the Women Airforce Service Pilots, the WASP, and Love became executive for all its ferrying operations.

She was certified on 19 military aircraft. She was among the first women to fly the Douglas C-54 Skymaster and the B-25 Mitchell, checked out on the P-51 Mustang, and on 15 August 1943 she and Betty Gillies qualified as first pilots on the B-17. On 2 September they set off from Cincinnati to deliver a B-17F to England. The mission was cancelled before they left Goose Bay, Labrador.

Recognition That Came Late

The WASP was disbanded in December 1944. At the end of the war, Nancy and Robert Love were decorated at the same time: he with the Distinguished Service Medal, she with the Air Medal for her operational leadership in training and assigning more than 300 women pilots to fly advanced military aircraft. In 1948 she was made a lieutenant colonel in the new US Air Force Reserve.

Love died of cancer in 1976 at the age of 62, before Congress finally granted WASP pilots recognition as military veterans. She was inducted into the National Aviation Hall of Fame in 2005, and a statue of her stands at New Castle County Airport in Delaware, where the Originals first flew.

Sources: Wikipedia (Nancy Harkness Love; Betty Gillies); National Museum of the U.S. Air Force biography; National WASP WWII Museum; U.S. Air Force and USAAF image records.