The original Fly Girls

 The UK Guardian has a story of Nancy Miller Stratford, one of the women who volunteered to join what would now be the Air Force. 

Since women were not allowed in combat, instead they ferried planes. 

After eight decades, she and a small group of other female pilots are finally earning more widespread recognition for the critical – and dangerous – roles they played in the second world war. A new book called Spitfires, written by the journalist and author Becky Aikman, chronicles the pilots’ vivid wartime stories as the first American women to fly military aircraft.

At the time, women like Stratford were banned from serving in combat roles for the US. So they joined the Air Transport Auxiliary instead: a British civilian group that ferried barely tested bombers and fighter planes to airbases, and then returned damaged wrecks for repair. Because the women often had to contend with shoddy equipment and bad weather, the job was hazardous and unpredictable; one in seven transport pilots died in crashes over the course of the war.

This was about those who volunteered in the UK: But in the USA, women also ferried planes, including the dangerous flight across the Atlantic Ocean to get planes to the UK for the Army Air Force: that group was called the WASPs.