People · Betty Skelton · Chapter 2 of 9

Wings in Wartime

The United States — 1942–1947

Betty Skelton turns sixteen in the summer of 1942, eight months after Pearl Harbor, at the exact moment American aviation is undergoing its most dramatic wartime expansion. For a licensed teenage pilot with an obvious gift, the timing seems almost too perfect. It isn't, quite. The Women Airforce Service Pilots — the WASP, formed that same year to ferry military aircraft and free up male pilots for combat — sets its minimum age at eighteen. A sixteen-year-old, however talented, does not qualify. Skelton spends the war years exactly two years too young for the one wartime flying program built for women like her.

What she does instead is simply keep flying — building hours, building skill, staying close to an aviation world that is, for the first time in American history, taking women pilots seriously out of pure operational necessity. It is not the uniformed, headline-making path the WASP offered its qualifying members. But it keeps her in the air through years when a great many civilian pilots, male and female alike, found their flying curtailed by wartime fuel rationing and airspace restrictions.

After the war

When the war ends in 1945, so does the WASP — the program is disbanded that December, its pilots sent home with military records that, disgracefully, wouldn't be formally recognized as veterans' service for another three decades. But its far larger legacy is cultural: for four years, the American public watched women fly military aircraft competently and routinely, and the postwar air show circuit that follows is more open to female pilots than anything that came before it.

Skelton, now out of her teens, finds her way into exactly that world — the barnstorming, competitive circuit of air shows and aerobatic meets that crisscrosses the country in the late 1940s. It's a scene built on nerve, reputation, and word of mouth as much as any formal credential, and it rewards precisely the qualities she'd already been sharpening since she was twelve: fearlessness, precision, and a complete unwillingness to be told what a girl couldn't do.

By January 1, 1948, flying a Great Lakes biplane, she is good enough to win a world championship outright.