The Flight Girls

May 1, 2020

I just finished reading The Flight Girls by Noelle Salazar.

This book, vivid in both character and setting, combines two things I enjoy most: history and aviation.

At first, upon realizing The Flight Girls is a romance novel at its heart, I was disappointed. When buying it, I had been too distracted by the WWII era planes and women pilots on the cover to care much beyond that; however, I decided that it still had planes and flying, so couldn’t be that bad!

This is one of those stories I connected with almost immediately. I saw pieces of myself in the main character, Audrey Coltrane, and some of her words were as if she were speaking directly to me, or even, through me.

The Flight Girls begins in 1941 Hawaii, just prior to the attack on Pearl Harbor, where Audrey is a civilian training military pilots. Within the first few pages, Audrey is standing on the beach, hand up to shield her eyes from the sun, to watch two Curtiss P-40 Warhawks (the iconic American WWII plane, with shark teeth painted on the nose) fly over on their way to another airstrip. I felt the same joy she did in the moment, having stopped countless times times to look skyward at the sound of an airplane engine, and knew, without a doubt, that I was going to really like this book.

Her budding romance with Lieutenant James Hart became forgivable by the amount of effort Audrey put into avoiding any such distractions from flying and her dream of purchasing the Dallas airfield where she learned to fly.

The story jumps to 1943, when, to make her losses in Hawaii mean something, Audrey travels to Sweetwater, Texas and joins the Women Airforce Service Pilots (WASP) program. She completes army training and is soon able to fly any military aircraft in the US fleet.

I had heard of the WASP program, but didn’t know very much beyond that these women flew test flights on US soil. Through The Flight Girls, I discovered that the scope of what these pilots did for the war effort was tremendous. While the men were flying planes in Europe, these women ferried warplanes, both ones right off the factory line and those having undergone repairs, to military bases across the country. They would often fly multiple aircraft in one day, ranging from small fighters to large bombers. These women pilots were more than up for the job. I find this a fascinating, and little known, piece of history.

Audrey, and the entire cast of female WASP pilots, opened my eyes to the wonders and dangers they faced daily. I laughed with her. Cried as she faced the death of comrades in horrific crashes. I felt broken as Audrey forced herself to move forward despite the losses, especially when, in the aftermath of a crash, a couple male pilots commented that one of these WASP women would go down putting on their lipstick, reminding them that warplanes were not the place for women.

As I reached the end, all I cared about was that Audrey would come through all this and find happiness. Her dream of buying the airfield propelled her through the death of her best friend, and the news that Lt. Hart’s plane had gone down near the German border and he was missing. I couldn’t put the book down, wanting to find out what happened. I hoped, at the bleakest of times, for that happy ending.

Overall, I enjoyed The Flight Girls and highly recommend it.

This story has piqued my interest in the women pilots of WWII, starting me down the research rabbit hole of the WASP’s Canadian counterparts. As if I have time for another project…