Rulers of the Air

In the control tower of the Atlanta airport WAVE Haughton bit all the lipstick off her lips last week. Cause: nervousness at bringing in her first plane with an admiral at the controls. But four hours later she sent him out as smoothly, calmly as if she had been running an airport-control tower since Kitty Hawk. This time there was no damage to cosmetics. She had heard the Admiral, George D. Murray, who commanded the Hornet, pronounce her work excellent.

Tall, curly-haired Jane Haughton has been an airport-control operator barely a month. But in that time she and 19 other WAVES, in towers at half a dozen naval fields, have proved themselves, in. a job once reserved exclusively for men, on the grounds that it calls for cool, quick thinking in the pinches, a level head at all times.

Air-control-tower operators are a kind of remote-control traffic cop. No plane may move about the field without their clearance. By radio and signal lamp they issue priorities in landings and takeoffs, clear and assign runways, give directions for taxiing, direct planes to hangars, cite wind direction and velocity. At a busy field, tower operators have no time for knitting.

In emergencies, lives depend on their fast reactions. One WAVE, on duty during a thunderstorm, discovered that static was jamming her radio. Quickly she grabbed a pair of code signal lights, blinked directions to two planes approaching from opposite directions, averted a bad tangle.

Airmen had their fingers crossed when WAVE tower operators were proposed. They doubted if they could master complex regulations, charts, procedures, meteorological and radio skills (the WAACs have shied away from it), were suspicious of how women would bear up under control-tower pressures.

But now the Navy is sold. This week the second class (25 WAVES, 15 she-Marines) finishes the six-week course at Atlanta Naval Air Station, comes out with third-class petty officer technician ratings. Soon they will be graduated 75 to a class, will eventually replace 60% of men operators for airports overseas.

WAVES' sole difficulty at tower work was not anticipated. On their first day they wore skirts climbing ladders to the towers. Sailors gawked. Next day slacks were regulation.

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