Margaret Ringenberg died in her sleep, aged 87, after a day at the Experimental Aircraft Association fly-in at Oshkosh, Wisconsin, during which she inspected new planes and met other veteran women pilots.
She used to say of them: ”The girls may be dragging an oxygen bottle along, but they’re just as noisy as they were in World War II … they’re still that satisfied-type person.” Margaret was satisfied, too. She loved to be in the air, and she had been up there all her life.
Born Margaret Ray and raised on the family farm in Indiana, she had her first ride off a nearby cornfield when she was eight, with a barnstormer who offered a flip in the air for a few cents. That planted the seed, although she did not think women were allowed to be pilots. Her post-high-school idea was to earn enough in a factory job at General Electric to study nursing, which would qualify her to be a stewardess — they were all medically trained in early passenger aviation. Then she wondered who would keep the craft in the air if an accident happened to a pilot, and told her father she wanted to learn to fly. Silence. A week later, she tried again. He explained how much it would cost and where to do it — Smith Field, Fort Wayne; once aloft, she no longer wanted to be a stewardess.
She went solo at 19, and soon had her licence. After Pearl Harbour, the government sent female pilots a telegram telling them they were needed, not in combat, but to ferry planes and to teach. Her father said that he had not served, and he did not have sons, so she would be the family member on active duty.
The Wasps — Women Airforce Service Pilots — did the same training as male cadets, but were not officially military; they took craft off factory production lines, test flew them, and delivered them across the US and Canada. Margaret, at 5ft 4in, was two inches too short to be first pilot on large planes — B-24, C-54, DC-3; on these, she was co-pilot. Aboard everything else, and Wasps handled more than 70 types, she was boss.
Wasps ferried seriously damaged planes to be repaired or to be cannibalised for parts. An engine blew up in Margaret’s battered craft on one lonely, risky boneyard run. She was ordered to parachute clear, but she still had control of the plane and landed it safely on the nearest airfield.
Wasps also towed targets for live-ammo gunnery practice; Margaret sewed targets, and her clothes, on the hangar machines.
By 1944, Wasps were no longer needed. Margaret, who was ”devastated”, returned home and stashed her gear in the attic. She got it out again for a parade, felt the thrill, returned to Smith Field, earned her flight instructors’ rating and taught privately.
She had logged the most hours at Smith but didn’t have many pupils. ”You know, a girl pilot wasn’t real popular.”
So she answered phones, mowed the yard, worked in the shop, anything. When Japan was about to surrender in August 1945, she dropped 56 000 leaflets across the state announcing the end of war.
In 1946, she married a banker, Morris Ringenberg, whom she met while they were on war service. They had a son, Michael, and a daughter, Marsha (who qualified for her licence at 17, and was often co-pilot to her mother). Margaret taught a little, then in the 1950s began to race. Her success filled two rooms in the family home floor to ceiling with hundreds of trophies: she entered every Powder Puff Derby from 1957 to 1977, and every women’s Air Race Classic, the Derby’s successor, from 1977 to this summer, when she finished third — she was always in the top 10, and won in 1988. There were also the Grand Prix, Kentucky Air Derby, Denver Mile High and many others, and, for a lark, she flew round the world as co-pilot to a Californian doctor.
Margaret stopped counting after she had logged more than 40 000 flying hours by 1994. That year she headed a team of two other veterans in a tiny Cessna 340, the Spirit of ’76, in the Round the World Air Race. All three were members of the Ninetynines, an association started by Amelia Earhart in 1929 to change the rules that blocked lift-off to females. Their radio died mid-Atlantic, they were blown off course by a typhoon, they were tracked by F-14 jets over Iran (and had headscarves ready should they be forced to land).
Everywhere they had to lower their voices to male levels to get attention from air traffic controllers. They came in last, but most-applauded.
Margaret raced from London to Sydney in 2001. She went for a spin at 288km/h around the Indianapolis Motor Speedway Circuit in 2004, and, as guest of Nasa, piloted the space shuttle simulator in 2002. But she had no taste for instrument flying: at last June’s classic she advised her co-pilot to ”feel” take-off and listen to the pitch of cockpit gadgets.
She co-wrote her story, Girls Can’t Be Pilots (1998), and her daughter told it again in Maggie Ray, WWII Air Force Pilot (2007). The honours and ovations culminated with her invitation to represent the Wasps at the dedication of the air force memorial in Washington, DC in 2006.
Morris died in 2003. Margaret’s children, and five grandchildren, all of whom had been aboard as she raced, survive her. – guardian.co.uk