Inspiration
The inspiration for the Courage in the Clouds documentary came from a 2021 educational webinar I produced to honor Cornelia Fort and the 80th anniversary of Pearl Harbor. Held on Dec. 7, 2021, more than 400 students and teachers attended the 60-minute event during which panelists, including a curator from the Pearl Harbor Aviation Museum in Honolulu and the director of the National WASP WWII Museum in Sweetwater, Texas, discussed how they were keeping history alive. With very positive feedback about the webinar, the next step was a documentary! Below is the video my team and I produced for the webinar.
Judith Miller, M.Ed., M.A.
WAFS & WASP
Women pilots who ferried military planes as civilians flying for the U.S. Army Air Forces during World War II were born at the dawn of aviation. They heard about the Wright Brothers at Kitty Hawk and saw early barnstormers perform aerial gymnastics at air shows.
September 6, 1942 changed the lives of 27 female pilots who responded to a telegram they received on that day to report to Wilmington, Delaware to be interviewed for a job as a ferry pilot in the Army’s new Women’s Auxiliary Ferrying Squadron, the WAFS. Led by Nancy Love, an accomplished pilot herself with more than 1,000 hours in the air, Betty Gillies and Cornelia Fort were the first two pilots to report.
Pursuing their dream to learn to fly, the first female pilots defied all odds and norms of the day to earn their seat in the cockpit. Once there, they excelled.
Courage in the Clouds
Courage in the Clouds: Cornelia Fort and the First Female Pilots of World War II is a 46-minute documentary that includes interviews with two of Cornelia’s nieces; an original Rosie who built planes at a Boeing factory in Seattle, a Holocaust survivor, the chief pilot for the modern version of the Wright B Flyer, and the director of the Woman’s Collection at Texas Woman’s University, the official repository for the WAFS/WASP.
Join us to learn about these amazing women and to keep this history alive!
