Pilot Elizabeth Ackerly joined Alan Anders, Jeff Geer and Mark Kandianis on a flight in a T-6 warplane from Bellingham, Wash., to Great Falls, Mont., then to Fairbanks, Alaska. Photo provided
Related story: Wartime challenge begets lifelong dedication to WASP legacy
By Ron Hayes
After the long flight across the Atlantic, the Boeing 767 taxies to the gate at Miami International Airport.
The hatch opens, passengers scramble, the pilot stands in the cockpit doorway to thank them for choosing American.
And almost every time, one of those departing passengers says, “Oh, are you the pilot? Oh!”
American Airlines has about 10,000 pilots, of which a mere 400 are women.
Elizabeth Ackerly of Ocean Ridge is one of them.
For the past 15 years, she’s flown those big 767s from Miami to Paris, Barcelona and Madrid.
And then, for eight days in June, she flew back to 1943, on a mission to honor the female pilots who helped make her career possible.
“I’m always up for an adventure,” Ackerly explained recently, relaxing at home on a break between flights, “but I didn’t know anything about Lend-Lease or the contribution these women had made.”
Not enough Americans do.
WASPs?
White Anglo-Saxon Protestants — right?
Wrong.
Women Airforce Service Pilots.
From the summer of 1943 until Dec. 20, 1944, more than 1,000 women pilots helped the Allies win World War II by ferrying warplanes from 120 air bases to embarkation points in the U.S.
About 25,000 women applied for the job. Fewer than 1,900 were accepted, and that September — after four months of training at Avenger Field in Sweetwater, Texas — 1,074 had earned their wings.
For the next 15 months, these women flew more than 60 million miles, delivering 12,650 airplanes of every type and, most important, freeing men for combat flight duty.
Considered civil service employees, they received no military benefits. They were paid a stipend of $150 a month and had to provide their own transportation to Texas.
Thirty-eight of them died.
Among the more secret of their secret missions, WASPs delivered T-6 Texan warplanes to Great Falls, Mont., where men of the Air Transport Command took them on to Fairbanks, Alaska. In Fairbanks, the planes were passed on to Russian pilots, who flew them on to Nome for maintenance, then across the Bering Sea to Siberia to join Russia’s war against Hitler.
The 6,000-mile Montana-Siberia route was part of the Lend-Lease program through which the U.S. supplied its allies with war materiel.
“The Soviet government didn’t even acknowledge the flights until after the Berlin Wall came down,” says Jeff Geer, a telecommunications executive and private pilot from Ferndale, Wash. “A lot of people thought we were just moving our planes to the Aleutians.”
Documenting a ‘great story’
Geer is the president and CEO of the Bravo 369 Foundation, a nonprofit organization dedicated to aviation history and education.
What a great story this is, he thought. What a great documentary it would make.
Warplanes To Siberia: Uncommon Allies.
Next July, Geer and his crew plan to fly a historic T-6 Texan with a support plane and film crew from Great Falls to Fairbanks, where they’ll be met by a Russian crew and fly on to Krasnoyarsk, Russia, filming all the way.
In June, Geer scheduled a practice flight for the first leg of the journey, from Bellingham, Wash., to Great Falls, then on up to Fairbanks.
Geer and Alan Anders, owner of the T-6, would fly the historic warplane, while another friend, Mark Kandianis, would be in the support plane, a single-engine Cessna 206.
Of course, if they truly wanted to honor the WASPs, a woman pilot should be part of the crew.
Well, Kandianis said, I’ve got an old friend down in Florida …
On June 22, Ackerly left Bellingham, flying with Kandianis. “We called ourselves the chuck wagon,” she says with a laugh. “We carried guns, fishing poles, sleeping bags, freeze-dried food — what-if stuff, as in, what if something goes wrong and they have to land in the middle of nowhere.”
Wanderlust came on early
Ackerly’s personal ascent to the skies began during Sunday afternoons in White Plains, N.Y., when her father took her out to the local airfield to watch the planes take off.
“This airport was so small it had pony rides,” she recalls. “But my fascination with airplanes was never anything technical. It was always wanderlust. Oh, they’re going somewhere!”
In 1988, she earned her commercial license. Flying commuter flights out of Memphis early on, she remembers the time a male passenger spotted her in the cockpit and demanded that the plane return to the gate so he could get off.
“That’s not possible,” the flight attendant told him.
Ackerly flew the plane. The passenger arrived safely.
Later, she worked as a private pilot for famed attorney F. Lee Bailey.
“He was very nice to me. If there was a speaking engagement, he took me along. He didn’t make me wait at the airport. If there was a dinner, I went, too.”
In 1998, she became a pilot for American, after 11 years as a flight attendant.
Ask her about the movie Flight, in which Denzel Washington prevents a crash by rolling the plane, and Ackerly rolls her eyes. “Unrealistic. It couldn’t happen.”
On the other hand, the plane crash in Cast Away that left Tom Hanks marooned on a desert island is, she says, quite real.
“I go through it every nine months in Dallas,” she says. “It’s recurrent simulator training where we go through everything that can go wrong.”
On the eight-day flight from Bellingham to Fairbanks, nothing went wrong.
Crossing the Atlantic, she flies at 35,000 feet. Flying to Fairbanks, they maintained an altitude of about 6,500 feet, rising to 12,000 over the Cascades.
Flying to Paris, you don’t stop midway. Flying to Alaska, they stopped every two hours to refuel.
Along the way, a two-man film crew followed in a camper truck to photograph their takeoffs and landings. They were interviewed by local newspapers and television stations.
In her 15 years as a commercial pilot, Ackerly has flown longer flights, and higher flights, but not more inspirational flights.
“The trip was wonderful,” she says. “I went to places and saw things I’d never seen, but what surprised me most was learning about the WASPs.”
After the war, all records of the Women Airforce Service Pilots’ contributions were sealed by the U.S. government.
The records were finally opened in 1977, after a press release mistakenly reported that the Air Force was training its first women fliers.
That same year, Sen. Barry Goldwater, R-Ariz., succeeded in having the WASPs granted full military status for their service.
And on July 1, 2009, about 300 surviving WASPs gathered at the U.S. Capitol to accept the Congressional Gold Medal.
In the decades since World War II, an increasing number of women have learned to fly.
As of 2010, there were 627,588 licensed pilots in America, of whom 42,218 are women, according to the Federal Aviation Administration. Of them, 8,175 are commercial pilots.
Elizabeth Ackerly is one of them.
But she still has one more challenge to conquer.
“I’m not afraid of flying to Europe,” she says, “but I’m afraid to drive on I-95. I won’t drive to work in Miami anymore. I take Tri-Rail.”
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