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Bringing History to Life on an Airfield in Sweetwater, Texas
Avenger Field is quiet now, but let the scene fade to a 1940s newsreel. Girls dressed in zoot suits walk beneath gates adorned with Fifinella, their gremlin mascot. A distant drone becomes deafening as two UC-78 trainers turn into the landing pattern. A PT-19A taxies up, barely shutting down before the cheering girls toss the pilot into the Wishing Well to celebrate her first solo. Today’s female military pilots venerate the roughly 1,100 Women’s Airforce Service Pilots that were winged here, but any WASP will say she just wanted to fly. If it meant testing new planes, towing gunnery targets, or ferrying the B-26 “Flying Coffin,” dangerous tasks that their male colleagues avoided, well, it was flying and flying was fun and FiFi’s girls would do it. The shop is full of their books and art, and you may even catch the WASP themselves, charming and irreverent as ever, in the hangar.
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