Posted on 11/26/2015 10:02:51 AM PST by KeyLargo
Wartime female pilot's glider flight - aged 100
By Ben_Falconer | Posted: November 22, 2015
Jill Farquarson was an ATA flyer
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Glider pilots have honoured a 100-year-old wartime hero by taking her back up in to the skies.
When former Air Transport Auxiliary flyer Jill Farquarson visited Cotswold Gliding Club's Aston Down airfield near Stroud in August, members discovered her heroic past and took her for a flight.
She was one of just 168 women who ferried all kinds of planes all over the country, often with precious little prior knowledge, during the Second World War.
Members conferred honorary membership of the club on her, on Friday, November 20 at her Frampton-on-Severn home.
The female ATA flyers were outnumbered almost 10 to one by their male counterparts, who often did not take too kindly to them - the women were one of the first employees in the country to secure equal pay too.
"I joined the ATA as a motorcycle dispatch rider but I wanted to be like my brothers, so I got a pilots licence," she told her fellow Wisma Mulia residential home neighbours at the presentation.
She started delivering aircraft including Mosquitoes, Spitfires and Lysanders in 1942, and the 'ATA girls' became pin-ups of their time.
"The men didn't like us," she laughed. "They were just jealous."
She was stationed at one of the ATA ferry pool airfields, Aston Down, near Chalford. and ATA HQ in White Waltham, Maidenhead. Some 173 ATA flyers were killed in service including pioneering female pilot Amy Johnson.
Mrs Farquarson had her moments too.
Read more: http://www.stroudlife.co.uk/Wartime-female-flyer-s-glider-club-flight-aged/story-28222063-detail/story.html#ixzz3sccddpuH
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(Excerpt) Read more at stroudlife.co.uk ...
Wow! Very cool.
That is awesome!
“The men didn’t like us,” she laughed. “They were just jealous.”
No. Having served “in” the RAF as an exchange officer in London and living in the RAF Bentley Priory mess (above the Dowding Room; http://bentleypriorymuseum.org.uk/), I assure her, the one’s that objected did so because they were gentlemen and gentlemen did not celebrate placing women in harms way, men protected women, kept them from harm.
Great post! And a nice break from all the depressing news out there.
Posing on a Mk XIV Spitfire with a Japanese plane in the background points to a South-East Asian Theater location in 1945.
Ping
I think they did a great job.
She flew some sweet birds. She had to have some amazing stories.
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