Attempting to eliminate at least one of the detriments to a Safety Board appointment, Phoebe took the civil service exam for senior air safety investigator and scored an 89 (including the widow’s preference).47 She appealed to her senator to help. In September 1940, Senator Kenneth McKellar wrote to the first lady about his concern that Phoebe’s talents and experience had been overlooked. “[B]ecause aviation is more or less a profession for men, many people charged with policy making in our government do not know the vast experience and accomplishments of Mrs. Omlie.” Given that the Civil Service Commission had informed him that “she heads one of their examination lists for aeronautics,” he felt certain that if Mrs. Roosevelt would speak with the chairman of the Civil Aeronautics Board or the assistant secretary of commerce, that a position could be found. The first lady wrote to both Harlee Branch at the Civil Aeronautics Board and Robert Hinckley at Commerce to urge them to find a position for Phoebe Omlie.48
Phoebe, frustrated with trying to search for a federal job from Memphis, returned to Washington in mid-January 1941. Thanking the first lady for her kindnesses, Phoebe reported that Harlee Branch had been “very nice in trying to work me in with their safety division,” but she had been told that their appropriation was so limited that such a place would have to be financed by Commerce.
After many weeks I had a talk with Mr. Hinckley. He had me talk with Mr. Brimhall, who referred me to a Mr. Wright who informed me that he had just come over from the Census Bureau and would have to take the matter up with Mr. Hinckley …. I talked with one of the assistants in the office of Secretary of Commerce Jesse Jones. He asked me to submit a short resume of my career. After this I was informed that Mr. Jones was impressed and would take the matter up with Mr. Hinckley.
After spelling out the run-around she had received, Phoebe concluded with a plea. “As I have devoted the last four years in writing and working out the original public aviation instruction legislation for Tennessee (which did not carry a salary) I must make connections where I can be on a payrole [sic] … Will you advise me?” Mrs. Roosevelt immediately posted a short note to Secretary of Commerce Jesse Jones: “Phoebe Omlie tells me that her case has been brought to your attention. I do not know what you can do, but I do think she should have consideration because of the work which she has done.”49
Apparently this time the pressure worked. In February 1941, Phoebe was appointed as senior private flying specialist assigned to the Research Division of the Civil Aeronautics Administration to coordinate all aviation work done by various agencies of the federal government.50 Shortly afterward, the president met with Phoebe and told her that he was particularly concerned about the paucity of trained ground personnel to service planes being readied for war.51 She was immediately put in charge of the Aviation Ground Servicemen’s Training Program, a position for which she was highly qualified, given her mechanical knowledge, her familiarity with airport management, and her experience setting up aviation schools and writing curricula. Her job was to systematize the efforts of the CAA, the WPA, and the Office of Education in establishing a 1.5-million-dollar defense training program to provide specialized training for airport ground personnel in skills required by expanding civil and military aviation. She was charged with inspecting 250 key airports around the country as potential training sites, as well as outlining the appropriate courses of instruction. Working with the Office of Education, Phoebe designed and established a ninety-day course of study that included airport safety practices, reading blueprints, airport management, care of equipment, fuel facilities, cleaning planes, clerical work, and the numerous other jobs around an airport that did not require highly skilled aviation mechanics. Although the leader of the program was a woman, the trainees were limited to men.52
“It’s a program that’s urgently needed,” she said. “As the number of airplanes increases, the demand for ground personnel becomes greater. In civil aviation it is estimated that at least nine ground men are needed to keep one pilot in the air. Military aviation requires a much larger ground crew per pilot.”53 Phoebe spent eight weeks setting up 120 schools in thirty-eight states. After the initial program to train 5,000 men in the first year and a half was organized, Phoebe served as the CAA’s technical advisor and liaison with the schools. Ultimately the program was expanded to 620 schools that graduated 9,000 mechanics and ground personnel for the war effort.54 In May, she was again in the air, traveling over 20,000 miles to establish flying schools to teach primary aviation around the country for the CPTP program. Among the schools she got up and running was one at Tuskegee, Alabama, “the first of its kind for negroes.”55
As all able-bodied men were being drafted for war and the need for trained pilots significantly increased, the Civil Aeronautics Authority predicted a critical shortage of flight instructors. The CAA press spokesman Charles E. Planck expressed grave concern that the CPTP programs and civilian schools that were training pilots for the army might have to cease operations. “Draft boards continue to draft civilian instructors into the foot army or else, with threat of draft, the instructors volunteer for the Air Transport Command, get into airline cargo carrying, or into some branch of service aviation. If draft boards cannot be dissuaded, women are going to have to fill the breach.”56 W. McLean Stewart, director of the War Training Service, concurred: “The Army is going to take every qualified man between the ages of 18 and 37. Every possible man must be released for the service, and from the standpoint of the manpower problem alone it makes sense to use women instructors when we can.”57
This discussion of women flight instructors occurred at the time when women in many capacities were stepping up to aid the war effort, volunteering for war industry jobs, or joining the Women’s Army Auxiliary Corps (WAAC). The Women’s Auxiliary Ferrying Squadron (WAFS), the predecessor of the Women’s Airforce Service Pilots (WASPs), had begun training female pilots for noncombat missions in support of the Army Air Forces.58
Percy McDonald also saw “no reason women could not be trained so that they could be used in the training of pilots, both as ground and flight instructors.”59 Without waiting for the federal government to do something about it, he and the Tennessee Bureau of Aeronautics decided to act. Before making their proposal, though, the bureau cautiously investigated the possible “psychological reactions of young student fliers towards women instructors.” They interviewed students at aviation schools that used them and found that “especially new students react very favorably under the patient guidance of women. The fear of altitudes and speed in the air is more quickly overcome [with a woman instructor].” The TBA was satisfied that their survey supported their own conclusions that “there is a definite place that women can take in the all-out war effort in the training of needed personnel in divisions of our aviation training schools when specialized aeronautical knowledge is required.”60 In 1942, McDonald persuaded the CAA to loan Phoebe Omlie to the state in order to establish an experimental program to fully train ten women flight instructors with the anticipation that the program would serve as a pilot project for later adoption by the Civil Aeronautics Administration and the U.S. military.61
The Tennessee Women’s Research Flight Instructors’ School was launched in September 1942 with a spartan budget of approximately $15,000, out of which the residence, subsistence, uniforms, and equipment, including three training planes, were bought or rented. Though the CAA provided no funds, besides loaning Phoebe’s services, the agency lent rhetorical support. Robert Hinckley wrote to McDonald that “women have always been the fundamental background for teaching, and I feel that when they are properly trained to teach aviation subjects then they can contribute much toward relieving man-power for actual combat flying.”62
Applicants for the school were required to be single or married to husbands in active military service, hold a private pilot’s license or better, and have at least 120 flying hours.63 They would be chosen on the basis of their “attitude toward women’s part in the war, physical fitness, prev
ious flying experience, and willingness to serve where needed.”64 In return, they were promised “62 hours of flying, 216 hours of ground school instruction, 162 hours of flight instructors ground school, a hard eight hours of work a day for six days a week for 12 weeks, uniforms, food, and an enormous old southern colonial house for a dormitory.”65
Calling it a southern colonial was a bit grand. Phoebe acquired an old farmhouse near Nashville’s Gillespie Field which she cleaned, painted and renovated into an army-style barracks. She begged blankets from the factory at the state penitentiary, commandeered some war-surplus cots, and set about hiring instructors. She immediately ran into the very shortage her school was seeking to overcome. Finding it impossible to get an instructor who could teach all the ground school classes she wanted to include (meteorology, aerial navigation, aircraft structure, aircraft engines, and civil air regulations), she had to hire five different instructors to teach in their particular areas of expertise.66
Ten students were selected from over 250 applicants. Six were chosen from Tennessee: Margaret Josephine Wakefield, a Vanderbilt graduate and teacher in Nashville Schools who had flying experience in six different types of aircraft; Martha E. Childress of Columbia, a recent Vanderbilt graduate who took her civilian pilot training there; Mary Elizabeth Pigg, another Vanderbilt University graduate and secretary with extensive experience in the Civil Air Patrol; Jennie Lou Gower of Murfreesboro, a former assembly line inspector for Vultee Aircraft; Lucille Biggs, a former school-teacher and employee of Gill Dove Airways in Martin, Tennessee; and Cora McDonald of Bristol, an aeronautical engineer who worked for Bristol Aircraft Company and had flown twelve types of planes. The others were Elizabeth Moody Hall of Lexington, Kentucky, daughter of missionaries to India and the wife of a military man, with 150 hours in her logbook; Helen Jean Johnston of Birmingham, Alabama, married to a major with the 127th Observation Squadron stationed in Tullahoma, Tennessee, had 300 logged flight hours; Dorothy Moselle Swain of Asheville, North Carolina, a ferrying pilot for Piper Aircraft; and Emma Jean Whittington of Hot Springs, who already held a ground instructor’s rating.67
Speaking to the press on women’s proper role in wartime aviation, Phoebe said,
The greatest contribution they can make to the all-out war effort is to prepare themselves for and accept jobs as teachers in the primary training of aviation pilots. It’s hard work and it isn’t a glamorous job, but women in America have never failed when they had to adapt themselves to meet emergencies. They will not fail today. Indeed, because of the high standards set up and their knowledge that they must be perfect to convince the skeptics, I feel that they will become the best instructors in aviation.68
Phoebe was particularly concerned that her trainees not be perceived by the press and the general public as frivolous or glamorous.
We need a new appraisal of women in war, particularly in aviation. The whole program of women in war work always gets distorted by excess publicity, until you can’t see the jobs for the women, uniforms and window dressing. I’m eager to add here that it is not the fault of the women, either. The first women in the factories had to smear grease on their faces and pull their hair down to satisfy the art editors of the newspapers. Later, as each new and different job for women opened up, the photographers dressed it up and the writers elaborated upon it, until we hardly know today what the important jobs are.69
Trips to the beauty shop were discouraged and the women wore drab uniforms of khaki-gray trousers, a dark-brown coat, and a dark-brown overseas cap.70 The young women studied “under similar conditions of discipline and curricula” as that afforded in a regular army cadet training school.71 Their six-day-a-week schedule began when they were awakened by the clang of an old plantation bell at 6:45 AM. They engaged in calisthenics on the lawn and a quick breakfast before their two-mile march in formation to the airport where they stayed until suppertime. Their days were filled with flight instruction, classroom instruction in aerodynamics, meteorology, navigation, and civil air regulations. Phoebe incorporated her ground servicemen’s “mechanics helper” course into the curriculum, including engine overhaul and repair, and recovering wings and flight surfaces in the shop, to ensure her instructors could service and fix their own aircraft. After supper the women had study time for two hours before collapsing into bed.72 The drill continued, good weather and bad. When the Cumberland River flooded and marooned the school, Phoebe borrowed a boat and rowed her students to the airport.73
Phoebe was tough, demanding, and “definitely not one of the girls.”74 She held to very rigid rules and pushed her students hard because, she said, these women would be training men to fight and lives would depend upon their skills. “I want that instruction to be as perfect and tough as possible because the men’s lives may depend on it. If we aren’t tough with them, these women, they won’t be tough on the men.”75 Moreover, Phoebe knew that, as women, her students would be held to higher standards than comparable men and that, as McDonald told them at their welcoming dinner, “Yours is a great responsibility. Whether or not you succeed or fail in this course may prove the turning point for women in aviation in the United States.”76
While Phoebe always referred to her trainees as women, the press inevitably called them girls and remarked on their attractiveness. For example, one reporter reassured readers that the students’ “good looks are above the average with blue eyes and brown hair prominent.”77 A Washington Daily News feature captioned a photograph of the women marching in formation in their dress uniforms as “Ten little girls from the Tennessee school.”78 An article featuring graduate Emma Hall in the Atlanta Journal called her “pert and pretty” under a headline reading “90-Pound Career Girl Teaches Navy Boys How to Fly Planes.”79
Each woman had logged a minimum of 120 hours before entering the school and each logged 165 additional hours or more before she graduated. Each qualified for a commercial pilot’s license as well as qualifying as a pilot instructor. In addition, each had at least five ratings in the ground school subjects of meteorology, aerial navigation, aircraft structure, aircraft engines, and civil air regulations. In case of an emergency, Phoebe told the newspapers, any one of her students would be able to manage an airport.80
The ten women graduated with great ceremony 3 February 1943, as Phoebe Omlie stood proudly by. Gov. Prentice Cooper commended the graduates and the Tennessee Bureau of Aeronautics, saying that he could “imagine no more important work than that of training fighter pilots.”81 Then C. I. Stanton from the Civil Aeronautics Authority took the podium:
It is my opinion that, since women have always excelled in instructing and have done most of the teaching of our nation, this should be their natural function in aviation. Our problem is to give the 1,000,000 boys who will graduate into the draft each year flight training. I believe we should train at least 200,000 of them each year. To do that, we shall need at least 5,000 women instructors.82
The graduates were immediately in very high demand since few instructors were highly and broadly qualified. The Embry-Riddle School in Miami, Florida, wanted to hire the whole class, as did a school in Kansas City; other requests came in from Missouri, El Paso, New Orleans, Atlanta, and several others. Jackie Cochran tried to recruit the whole class for the WASPs.83 In the end, the women were assigned to various aviation training schools across the country where the CAA held contracts with the armed forces.
Tennessee Bureau of Aeronautics executive director Col. Herbert Fox celebrated the successful completion of the school as a model for a national initiative. “Our job was to prove that women can do flight instructing. It is now the job of the federal government to train them. I believe they intend to do that.”84 The Tennessee Bureau of Aeronautics and the Civil Aeronautics Authority asked Congress for a supplemental appropriation of $2.5 million to train 500 more women instructor pilots within six months with 400 more in training. About a month after the first class graduated, the House Appropriations Committee was hearing testimony on the bill in c
losed session.85 A year later, McDonald declared that, despite the apparent success of the Tennessee school whose graduates had by then trained an estimated 500 men and the eagerness of over 1,000 women pilots who had contacted his agency seeking training, there had been no action on the bill.86
Given discussions about the acute need for flight instructors, it is difficult to discern why the initiative was not funded, but it appears that a number of factors were involved. Among them was the bubbling controversy over the heavily funded women’s ferry service, a discomfort by the military in having civilians train military pilots that was exacerbated by their reluctance to use women to train male pilots, and a rapidly dwindling evidence of need, due largely to stepped-up efforts by the military to provide and train flight instructors of their own.
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