Recruitment of Women Pilots for the ATA - Phase I

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 The Air Transport Auxiliary opened its ranks to women in November of 1939 and hired the first eight women pilots by the end of the year. The women started flying effective 1 January 1940. This post looks at how these early women fliers were recruited.

 

The ATA was conceived as a means to enable qualified pilots not eligible for service in the RAF to contribute their unique skills (flying) to the war effort. Since the purpose of the organisation was to put qualified pilots to work -- not train people to fly -- recruitment was initially confined to fully trained pilots. The minimum qualifications were a 'A' (private) licence and more than two hundred hours solo flying. Male applicants had to be over the age of 28 (as those younger than that were subject to military service) and could be as old as 50.  This age range included all men who had flown in the First World War. Women could be as young as 22.

Due to the small numbers the ATA planned to employ (thirty men and eight women), it was anticipated that applications would exceed available places. ATA management decided to make hiring decisions only after reviewing all applications, to ensure that they selected the best pilots, not just those that applied first. Furthermore, not trusting to paper qualifications, the ATA tested all applicants before making a decision about employment. 

The selection process required a candidate to present themself before a 'selection committee' headed by d'Erlanger for men and Gower for women. If found suitable, the candidate was tested by ATA's Chief Flying Instructor, ARO MacMillan (formerly of British Airways). Because of the limited number of slots, Gower was able to select a total of ten women pilots (the initial intake of eight and two shortly afterwards), all of whom had more than 500 flying hours experience.

However, as the war moved from 'Sitzkrieg' to 'Blitzkrieg' in 1940, the demands placed on the ATA required a dramatic expansion in staff. From 40 pilots in early 1940, the ATA needed 240 by the end of 1940. The pool of available pilots with more than 500 hours flying experience had been exhausted. For a period, BOAC pilots were seconded to the ATA to help out, but these men (and they were all men) had extensive experience on heavy four-engined aircraft and flying boats. They were urgently needed to ferry bombers across the Atlantic and keep open the lines of communication to the Far and Middle East. This arrangement was therefore not sustainable.

The only solution was to recruit pilots with more limited experience, the often derided 'hobby fliers,' for domestic ferrying. In December 1940, an appeal was made over the wireless for pilots with private licences to apply for work with the ATA. The response was encouraging. It appeared that there were still many pilots with limited flying experience eager to support the war effort. By lowering the requirements to just fifty solo hours, the ATA was able to tap into a far larger manpower pool.

To make these less experienced pilots, whether men or women, competent ferry pilots, however, required additional training. Since all civilian flying schools had been suspended at the start of the war and the RAF's training establishment was already overwhelmed with training Service personnel, the ATA assumed the burden of training it's own pilots. Thus, roughly one year after its establishment, the ATA designed and initiated it's own training program, which will be the subject of later entries.

Notably, in the period from January 1941 to summer 1942, while the number of men with more than fifty hours flying time were minimal, there were still many women with hundreds of hours flying from before the war. Since applicants to the ATA were checked out and hired on the basis of aptitude and suitability (as assessed by the professional instructors seconded from BOAC), women with more flying experience were favoured over men with less. In this period, therefore, women were hired at a disproportionately higher rate. Yet by mid-1942, the reserves of experienced women pilots had also been depleted and the ATA needed new sources of pilots. This second phase of recruitment will be examined in the next entry.

A former ATA woman pilot is one of the leading female protagonists in the Bridge to Tomorrow Trilogy about the Berlin Airlift.  Find out more about the series at: https://helenapschrader.net/bridge-to-tomorrow/

Watch a video teaser here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Y7rS_Mwy3TU 

                                      

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