WASP (Women Airforce Service Pilots)
Alice Lovejoy 43-W-4
(14 August 1915 - 13
September 1944)
(excerpt from To Live
and Die a WASP)
Alice Lovejoy (43-W-5) was flying over the Port Isabel
Channel, near Brownsville, Texas in the rear seat of an AT-6 Texan fighter. She
had just celebrated her 29th birthday and her first anniversary as a WASP
pilot.
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| Port Isabel Channel, Texas |
Her first duty station had been the Romulus Army Airfield near Detroit,
Michigan. There, for a year, she learned to fly heavier aircraft, including
B-17, B-24, and B-25 bombers. Delivery flights took her all over the country
and even into Canada.
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| WASP Alice Lovejoy |
As one of the more qualified WASP pilots, Alice got orders
for Pursuit School at the Brownsville Army Airfield, where she would fly some
of the country’s best and fastest fighter aircraft.
Born August 15, 1915, in Scarsdale, New York, Alice was the
second of four daughters born to Frank and Emma Lovejoy. …
… In early 1942, with the country now at war, she became a
clearance officer for the Piper Aviation Company in Lock Haven, Pennsylvania.
There she earned her pilot license and a year later, March 26, 1943, she began
her WASP training in Sweetwater.
Just after noon, September 13, 1944, three planes were on a
training exercise in a V Formation. Alice and her instructor were flying back
behind the leading AT-6 as one of the wingmen. Descriptions of the accident are
vague, but it appears that one of the wingmen was moving into either a Right or
Left Echelon Formation—where the planes change from a triangular formation into
a diagonal line formation with one plane following the other.
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| WASP (Women Airforce Service Pilots) Alice Lovejoy |
… Because news reports say there was a collision
between the two wingmen when the “wing planes were changing position,” and
because of the final crash results, it’s possible that Alice was piloting the
plane that was moving, right or left, and she was the pilot who collided with
the other plane when she was moving up into position.
Alice was unconscious. She must have struck her head
somehow. Her slightly injured instructor, who was flying with her, said he
tried to get her out, but couldn’t. He jumped to safety, landing at the mouth
of the Port Isabel Channel, and was rescued from the water by the crew of an
Army engineering dredge. Alice crashed and died in the AT-6. The other pilot
made it back to Brownsville Field safely. He was uninjured.
RIP
