Here Come the WAFS

On the parched fringes of Avenger Field at Sweetwater, Tex., Army Air Forces men saw a new kind of graduation ceremony, met a new kind of flying graduate.

Around a wishing well among the administration buildings clustered 43 bronzed and windburned women in slacks and white blouses, their eyes on a leggy Air Forces colonel. He dug in his pocket, fished out a silver dollar, tossed it into the well, where it slid down among dimes and quarters dropped there by students for luck. (They are fished out periodically for the Red Cross.)

Then all trooped off to the flying line, where 43 new pilots of the WAFS (Women's Army Ferrying Service) got their wings pinned on their blouses by their taffy-haired director, Jacqueline Cochran.

It was the WAFS' second graduation. When the last diploma was handed out, the new pilots became members of the Army Air Transport Command, by next afternoon were fanning out to ferrying bases at Long Beach, Calif., Dallas, Tex., Romulus, Mich., and Wilmington, Del. There they joined up with other WAFS already delivering aircraft from factories to Army tactical bases.

Little Girls, Big Ships. Already discarded by military airmen is the notion that women airmen are good only for flying light craft like Piper Cubs and Aeroncas. Featured airwomen like Jackie Cochran long ago kicked the theory on the shins by flying such "hot" craft as the Seversky P-35, the Lockheed Hudson (one of which she helped push across the Atlantic). The WAFS' new graduates had proved it in the mass. They had flown everything from grasshoppers to snappy two-engined Cessna AT-17s.

Their instructors (all men but three) proudly reported that they learned rapidly. Male teachers found that bluster did not work with these pupils, as it did with some men students. One instructor's stock warning to careless and irritable trainees: "Come on now, honey. Let's stay in the cockpit and fly this thing through."

WAFS get military drill (at which they excel men), learn meteorology, navigation and other pilots' lore, wear coveralls while flying and, in general, are "processed" like men. But there are some variations. Example: Avenger's pin-neat barracks have walls of Nile green and white. The cream-colored lockers, where cosmetics and pink underthings are discreetly kept, are locked with hasps tastefully pegged with pink golf tees.

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