Flying ‘bug’ bites WASP early, pilot recounts service

  • Published
  • By Valerie VanKleeck
  • 341st Space Wing Public Affairs
MALSTROM AIR FORCE BASE, Mont. (AFPN) --  It was not Charles Lindbergh, but “a fella before him” whose name escapes her now. She remembers he came through Charleston, W.Va., when she was very young, and she said he inspired her to learn to fly.

“I was about 7 or 8 years old when this famous flier came to town. Everyone turned out to see him. I said to Daddy, ‘I’m going to fly airplanes when I grow up,’ and I did,” said Marty Volkomener, who will be 84 years old this year.

Not only did she fly airplanes, she went on to become a member of the Women’s Airforce Service Pilots, which played a vital role during World War II.

The organization trained women who already had their private pilot licenses to fly military aircraft in noncombat missions to free up the military men to fight. It also included women with their commercial pilot licenses ferrying aircraft, allowing men who were civilian pilots to join the combat mission, according to early records.

The first WASP class was in November 1942. Mrs. Volkomener was in the fourth class, which started in April 1943.

She learned to fly sea planes at the Kanawha Flying School, named after the river in Charleston where she trained. She said she used her lunch break at work to pursue her dream of becoming a pilot.

“I could go fly for a half an hour at lunch and not bother anything,” Mrs. Volkomener said.

She said she thinks she logged about 80 hours before she was asked about flying planes for the military.

The flying school staff learned of the WASP training program, and they contacted one of the WASP founders.

“At least that’s what they told me when they asked me if I would be interested,” Mrs. Volkomener said. “Well, I just couldn’t get there fast enough.”

That was the beginning of a journey that lasted a little more than a year. But it was a journey that she said fulfilled her dreams and placed her in the history books with 1,073 others.

Her class, the program’s largest, was trained at Avenger Field in Sweetwater, Texas, graduating 112 women, according to statistics gathered on the training program.

And she said she had to learn to fly all over again to make it to graduation.

“Takeoffs are drastically different. If you take off in a sea plane the [same] way you take off in a land plane, you’re going to get wet,” Mrs. Volkomener said.

Flight checks were always interesting, too, she said.

“We all knew that eventually, we would have a flight check by a military officer,” she said. “They washed out a lot of candidates.”

But she learned how to fly a land plane, earned her wings and went on to experience what very few women ever have.

She even met and trained with one of the founders, Jacqueline Cochran.

“She was a good pilot, and she wanted all of us to be good pilots, too. She pushed us hard, but she was fair,” Mrs. Volkomener said. “She used to tell us over and over, ‘You don’t make any mistakes or it goes against the whole organization.’”

Mistakes were not going to be made by this determined new recruit, Mrs. Volkomener said.

She did not ferry aircraft, she flew missions, she said.

Reluctant to go into details, she told of “being up there at 10,000 feet, or wherever they asked me to go for anti-aircraft tracking training.” She also shared stories about hauling targets for the aerial gunners.

The targets were connected to a rope that extended about 300 feet behind the plane, Mrs. Volkomener said.

“One time, they were shooting at me instead of the target. They were hitting close enough [that] they would jar the airplane,” she recalled. “That was pretty scary.”

In 1944, the need for the WASP services declined drastically, and the unit was dissolved.

Her aviation career did not end then, though. She worked for the Civil Aeronautics Administration as an aircraft communicator in Dillon, Mont. The CAA was the beginning of what is now the Federal Aviation Administration, and she witnessed some of the early changes.

It was during this phase of “flight” that Mrs. Volkomener altered her course, met the man she would marry and gave up taking to the sky for raising a family. They moved to nearby Great Falls shortly after they were married. She has been here ever since.

As excited as she gets when talking about her time as a WASP, she is also very modest about the importance of what she has done.

Mrs. Volkomener said her most significant accomplishment was, “I never had an accident, and I never got lost on a cross-country flight.”

She said her favorite memory was, “Just that I was one (WASP) and I loved every minute it.” (Courtesy of Air Force Space Command News Service)