Gregers

🇬🇧Mary Ellis delivered a Wellington bomber. The ground crew searched it because they didn’t believe she was the pilot. They looked through the aircraft from nose to tail. She had flown it there. During the war, she was Mary Wilkins, a farmer’s daughter from Oxfordshire who joined Britain’s Air Transport Auxiliary in October 1941. Her job was to deliver aircraft where they were needed. That meant learning to handle very different machines, and then climbing into them and flying them across Britain. In her later recorded testimony, she described navigating delivery flights without radio assistance, finding unfamiliar airfields, and switching between aircraft types. The variety was extraordinary. Spitfires. Wellingtons. Mosquitos. Hudsons. Over her ATA service, she ferried around 1,000 aircraft of 76 different types to 210 airfields. Among them were 403 Spitfires. Then, in the summer of 1945, came something very different: the Gloster Meteor. She became one of only two ATA women to ferry Britain’s first operational jet fighter. Every aircraft delivery was a flight someone had to make before the machine could begin its next assignment. Mary made around a thousand of them. Mary Ellis died on July 24, 2018, at the age of 101. Let’s remember her. For more WWII stories, follow @Vanguard_WW2