Nancy Batson Crews: Alabama's First Lady of Flight (Alabama Fire Ant) Review

Average Reviews:

(More customer reviews)This book about Nancy Batson and her life time in aviation is one of the best books out on the subject of Women in Aviation. This book is well written, and above all very well researched and factually historically accurate. Most of the books on the subject time are very lacking in historical accuracy.

This book as well asSarah Rickman's other two books on the subject area and time are now the best references available. They well researched accounts of the life and times of the women who flewin World War II.
Her other books are: Nancy Love, Her life's Story, and The Originals, the Story of the first WAFS.

From one who "was there".

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Product Description:
This is the story of an uncommon woman - high school cheerleader, campus queen, airplane pilot, wife, mother, politician, businesswoman - who epitomizes the struggles and freedoms of women in 20th-century America, as they first began to believe they could live full lives and demanded to do so. World War II offered women the opportunity to contribute to the work of the country, and Nancy Batson Crews was one woman who made the most of her privileged beginnings and youthful talents and opportunities. In love with flying from the time she first saw Charles Lindbergh in Birmingham (October 1927), Crews began her aviation career in 1939 as one of only five young women chosen for Civilian Pilot Training at The University of Alabama. Later, Crews became the 20th woman of 28 to qualify as an 'Original' Women's Auxiliary Ferrying Squadron (WAFS) pilot, employed during World War II shuttling P-38, P-47, and P-51 high-performance aircrafts from factory to staging areas and to and from maintenance and training sites. Before the war was over, 1,102 American women would qualify to fly Army airplanes.Many of these female pilots were forced out of aviation after the war as males returning from combat theater assignments took over their roles. But Crews continued to fly, from gliders to turbojets to J-3 Cubs, in a postwar career that began in California and then resumed in Alabama. The author was a freelance journalist looking to write about the WASP (Women Airforce Service Pilots) when she met an elderly, but still vital, Nancy Batson Crews. The former aviatrix held a reunion of the surviving nine WAFS for an interview with them and Rickman, recording hours of her own testimony and remembrance before Crews' death from cancer in 2001. After helping lead the fight in the 70s for WASP to win veteran status, it was fitting that Nancy Batson Crews was buried with full military honors.