Member Contract News

WWW friends, I have spent five years of my life making this following announcement happen.

I have been offered a contract for my biography of Nancy Harkness Love, the woman who founded and led the women pilots who ferried airplanes for the U.S. Army in World War II. I began researching and writing this book in the spring of 2002.

On April 30, I completed the lengthy peer review process with the University of North Texas Press in Denton, Texas. — The waiting and responding, always positively, to the critiques, and working to EVER improve on the manuscript, were grueling. Today — May 22, 2007 — the university’s editorial board endorsed my work and approved a contract.

We don’t have the title nailed down yet, but it will be something like Nancy Harkness Love and the WASP Ferry Pilots of World War II. The target publication is in time for the Women In Aviation Conference, to be held mid March 2008 in San Diego. The women and men who attend this conference are my “choir” so to speak — they buy my books about the women who flew in WWII.

This will be the first biography on Love, who died in 1976. It follows my history of Nancy’s group — THE ORIGINALS: The Women’s Auxiliary Ferrying Squadron of World War II, published in 2001 by Disc-Us Books Inc. Love recruited 28 women in the fall of 1942 to form the initial women’s ferrying squadron for the Air Transport Command, U.S. Army Air Forces.

Nancy’s “girls”— the group grew from the original 28 to a high of 303 in early 1944 — began ferrying trainers then moved up to twin-engine aircraft and a few, including Love, flew the big four-engine bombers like the B-17. But the biggest job these women did for the Army was to ferry the swift, capricious WWII fighters known as pursuits — the fastest planes the Army had in 1944. The women moved these airplanes from the factories to the docks on both coasts to be shipped abroad to combat.
The women who flew — as civilians — for the Army in World War II became known as the WASP in 1943.

Nancy Love was a true a pioneer — a woman with courage, spirit and vision. More to come on the Nancy Love book as we proceed toward publication.

Posted by Sarah Byrn Rickman
Also the author of THE ORIGINALS: The Women’s Auxiliary Ferrying Squadron of World War II — a history —
and FLIGHT FROM FEAR — a WASP WWII novel.