LOS ANGELES — Betty Jane Wil liams, who joined the Women Airforce Service Pilots, an elite group that flew noncombat missions during World War II, and served as a test pilot in Texas, died Monday following a stroke, her family said. She was 89.
The war effort “needed everybody,” Williams, a retired lieutenant colonel who lived in the city’s San Fernando Valley, told the Los Angeles Times in 1996. “An airplane doesn’t respond to sex. It only responds to skill, and I was bitten by the aviation bug.”
Six months before the Dec. 7, 1941, attack on Pearl Harbor, Williams earned her pilot’s license in a civilian training program. She underwent pilot training at the University of Vermont, then taught Navy and civilian pilots instrument-flight techniques.
In January 1944, she returned to the cockpit with the Women Airforce Service Pilots, or WASP.
About 25,000 women applied for the program, but only 1,830 were accepted. She was one of 1,074 women who successfully completed the flight training in Sweetwater, Texas, as part of the WASP program established during the war to cope with the domestic shortage of military pilots.
At first, the women were restricted to flying in daylight in small aircraft, but they gradually took on more dangerous roles.
“When you’re a pioneer,” Williams said in 1996 in the Times, “you don’t want to be called a sissy.”
Born in 1919 in rural Kingston, Pa., Williams was the middle of three children and grew up wanting to fly.
“Girls just didn’t do those kinds of things,” Williams said in 1997 in the Daily News of Los Angeles. “But the 1940s had arrived, and so had war. That changed everything.”
In the WASP program, she was stationed at what is now Randolph Air Force Base near San Antonio. The women wore uniforms and piloted 78 types of military aircraft — yet when the program disbanded in December 1944, they were denied military benefits and treated as civilians.
“We just thought we did an extraordinary job,” Williams told the Times in 1993. “But to be booted out . . . it was a terrible injustice.”
In 1977, the women were recognized for completing military service and allowed to apply for veterans benefits.
