Passion for piloting planes in WWII fuels woman's service

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It didn't include your run-of-the-mill romance, but it was some kind of a love story.

World War II was raging hot and heavy during the early months of 1944. Frances Tanassy, a resident of Sun City Summerlin, remembers it well. She was a pilot in the Women Airforce Service Pilots (WASP) at the time, and was ferrying a P-40 fighter plane from one military base to another.

Bad weather forced her to stay overnight at an Army Air Corps installation in Memphis. That evening, she met Emil -- fighter pilot, operations officer, hero with numerous commendations. He had recently returned from combat in Africa and Italy.

Fran told him she was piloting the P-40 out of town the next morning. He looked at her aghast. After all, the P-40 was one of the workhorses in the U.S. air arsenal. It rose to glory during the early days of the war as the bulwark of the famed Flying Tigers in China.

What was a petite, pretty, 23-year-old lady doing in the cockpit of this deadly war machine?

"He didn't believe women could fly P-40s, and that's how we fell in love," Fran said with a big smile during a recent chat at her home.

The rest is history. They married soon afterward and lived happily every after, for the next 52 years, until Emil's death 11 years ago. Two lovebirds with one common passion -- flying.

"I was about 20 years old when I flew for the first time. I was making $18 a week working a routine job in Los Angeles, but I spent $7 of it one day to buy one hour of flying time," Fran recalled.

That did it. She became hooked on airplanes.

It was 1942, and she returned home to Idaho soon afterward to take flying lessons.

"I got the 35 hours of flying time that I needed to be invited to a new military program," she said. "It was called the Women's Flying Training Detachment (WFTD).

"I did my training in Sweetwater, Texas. There were only a few hundred women in the program," she said.

The women's role was to fly every kind of plane in the Army Air Corps to relieve male pilots from the tasks of ferrying new and rehabilitated planes to various military points in North America.

In August 1943, the government combined the Women's Flying Training Detachment and a competing group of female fliers into the WASP. More than 25,000 women applied for WASP training, but only 1,830 were accepted due to qualifications that were just as rigid as those for male cadets. And only 1,074 women received their silver wings as graduate WASPs.

"I don't think there's more than 300 of us still alive," Fran said.

"The training program was exactly the same as it was for all male pilots in the Air Corps. We flew the same aircraft -- every kind of single- and twin-engine plane they had," she said.

But unlike the male pilots, the ladies never received rank.

"We were viewed by the Army as nothing, nobodies, pilots with no rank. We had no military rights or pension, just a commercial pilot's license."

Although they never served in combat, the WASPs lost 38 pilots through various mishaps. Unlike males, who were accorded military honors, the government didn't pay for their burials.

The WASPs were deactivated on Dec. 20, 1944, when the Air Corps decided there were sufficient men to now do the jobs that had been performed so capably by the women.

In 1977, a bill was approved in Congress giving the surviving WASPs full military status as veterans, entitling them to pensions and all benefits.

"That was a big day for me," Fran said. "They gave me the rank of 1st lieutenant."

Herb Jaffe was an op-ed columnist and investigative reporter for most of his 39 years at The Star-Ledger of Newark, N.J. He is the author of the novel "Falling Dominoes." Contact him at HJaffe@cox.net.