News Updates From Sarah
Nancy Love: WASP Pilot Available NOW!
Author Sarah Byrn Rickman has written Nancy Love: WASP Pilot for young adults but on a level that adults, too, will appreciate this woman’s incredible story. Available today!
The first women Love recruited had a minimum of 500 flight hours. Most had more — including a 35-year-old flight instructor and mother of three with 3500 hours [Lenore McElroy], and a 23-year-old barnstormer with 2900 hours [Evelyn Sharp]. Every woman pilot who could deliver an aircraft anywhere in the U.S. freed a male pilot to be assigned to a combat-related job.
The women didn’t care. They wanted to fly. America was at war. Patriots to the core, they wanted to fly for their country. Nancy Love flew the top fighter, the P-51, first and led the way for her women to ferry all the fighter aircraft.
Throughout 1944, up to 134 women ferried those newly built, high-powered fighters to the docks at Newark, New Jersey. There, the planes were loaded on to Liberty ships bound for England and the war. The women delivered 926 critically needed P-51s in addition to the other fighter aircraft.
This was the most important job performed by the women pilots of WWII. And only a few people know that still obscure fact. Now you know as well!
WASP of the Ferry Command
IS NOW AVAILABLE AS AN AUDIBLE BOOK
Click here to view and purchase.
OF NOTE:
WASP of the Ferry Command was awarded FIRST PLACE, NONFICTION 2018 in the Marjorie Davis Roller Nonfiction Award. The National League of American Pen Women, Inc., Published by the University of North Texas Press.
Nancy Love: WASP Pilot
AVAILABLE MAY 25th, 2019
AVAILABLE MAY 25th, 2019
“With publication of her new YA book, Nancy Love: WASP Pilot, Sarah enhances her well-established reputation for bringing the stories of the WASP of WWII to life. If the subject is WASP, Sarah is THE expert.”
–TRISH BECKMAN Commander, US Navy (retired)
“Sarah has a gift for telling compelling stories about the WASP, the women pilots of World War II. Young readers will enthusiastically absorb her love for and fascination for this area of U.S. history.”
–ERIN MILLER, author of Final Flight Final Fight, chronicling the fight to have her, WASP grandmother buried at Arlington Cemetery
BJ Erickson: WASP Pilot
BJ and Nancy Love flew Genevieve, a much-patched-up, war-weary B-17, to the graveyard — with loving care. She had to be flown at a greatly reduced airspeed because of a large red sign on the instrument panel that read, DO NOT RETRACT LANDING GEAR.
“Along the entire route, we tried to ignore intruders that flew by us and signaled — in a superior manner — that we’d forgotten to pull the landing gear up,” Nancy wrote. “We strongly suspected that the epithet ‘women drivers’ was being directed at us along with their hand signals.”
Finding Dorothy Scott
“Oh, Pop, we made a nighttime formation take off between smudge pots lining the runways. I’ll never in all my life forget that ride! We were nearly touching the other plane, guided only by small lights and the flare of the exhaust. The rapidly fading field looked like a million small fires.”
Dorothy’s letters put you in the aircraft with her. Her voice transcends the years.
WASP of the Ferry Command
Personal stories from 40 daring women who lived the story that IS the legacy of the Ferrying Division, Air Transport Command: Decades ahead of their time, these women ferried the Army’s newest aircraft to the docks to be shipped abroad to the battlefront — or wherever else in the U.S. they might be needed.
Flight to Destiny
Fiction
Fiction
Fly the skies over America with three fictional heroines, Annie, Clare and Midge, who become WASP ferry pilots. Meet them on December 7, 1941, and live WWII with them into summer 1945. Through them, you will get to know real-life WASP leaders Nancy Love and Jackie Cochran.
Nancy Batson Crews
“Nancy’s story comes straight from my heart. We were best friends her final year. She flew P-47s, P-51s, heroic stuff to this child of WWII! Nancy chose me to write the story of her beloved WAFS. THE ORIGINALS is as much her book as it is mine. Then I chose to write her story — the sometimes painful but inspirational portrait of a patriot.” – Sarah Byrn Rickman, 2017
Nancy Love and the WASP
Nancy Love, with General William H. Tunner, created THE workable concept for women pilots to ferry aircraft for the US military and successfully led her WASP to do just that. By September 1944, she had 134 civilian women pilots delivering three-fifths of all single-engine pursuit aircraft coming off factory assembly lines.
How? Read her story and find out.
Flight from Fear
Fiction
Fiction
Lacy Stearns swallows her fear of flying to become a WASP and fly in place of her husband who dies in a B-24 crash early in the war. She and her friends fly, live, love and, because it is wartime, lose loved ones. World War II tested the mettle of a generation — men and women. The WASP were not found wanting.
The Originals
Twenty-eight women with at least 500 flying hours, commercial licenses and 200-horsepower ratings, answered their country’s call and joined the Women’s Auxiliary Ferrying Squadron. Founder Nancy Love led them from flying trainers to ferrying fighters to U.S. ports for shipment to combat. Personal stories and history blend in this first book about the WAFS.
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Air Transport Command
World War II
Click on the ATC patch to read Sarah’s thumbnail history of the WAFS/WASP
