This WWII flight trainer shot down stereotypes

[cec]

This WWII flight trainer shot down stereotypes




By Rick Steelhammer - The Sunday Gazette-Mail via The Associated Press
Posted : Monday Nov 12, 2007 16:35:00 EST

LEWISBURG, W.Va. — At an airfield in southernmost West Virginia in the early 1940s, a diminutive Greenbrier Valley woman taught scores of World War II pilots the basic skills needed to enter the macho realm of military aviation.
Ruth Tolley Gwinn, now 86, was one of eight instructors — and the lone woman — who taught a course to determine which Army Air Corps cadets would move on to advanced flight training.
“I remember when one group of cadets was being assigned instructors, I heard one of the guys, he was from Bluefield, say in a disgusted voice, ‘Oh, God! I got the woman!’” Gwinn recalled. “You had to fight that attitude a lot in those days. Still do. But you have to rise above it and not let it get to you.” The cadets received hands-on flight instruction at the Princeton airport.
“They were here for three months and during that time they got 35 hours of flying time in Piper Cubs,” said Gwinn. “If they didn’t pass the primary flight class ... they were still in the Army, so some of them went into the ground forces and fought with the infantry.” Gwinn said she did not make the final decision, but “I graded them, and they had to get certain grades or they wouldn’t go to the next level.”
Gwinn got her start in aviation not long after she, her father and younger sister moved from Beckley to her grandmother’s Pence Springs farm during the Great Depression.“ Some people from Bluefield rented a place in a nearby field to use as an airfield,” she said. Later on, crews from the federal Works Progress Administration graded and lengthened the turf airstrip, now 2,800 feet long and officially known as Hinton-Alderson Airport.
Since the grassy runway was located in a field in a river valley filled with hayfields and pastures, it wasn’t always easy to spot from the air. “There was no radio or flight control, but there’s a riding ring at one end that’s kind of a landmark. I made some wind socks for the airport ... and after we started selling enough gas Esso gave us some new ones.”
Gwinn said her mother’s early, unexpected death left her father with the desire to take the plunge into something new and challenging.“ I remember watching him make a parachute jump from a hot-air balloon at the airfield before he took up flying,” she recalled.
After learning to fly at Pence Springs, her father became licensed as a flight instructor and bought an Aeronca.
“Dad taught people to fly, and he’d go to airfields to take people up for rides,” she recalled. “I’d go with him, but I didn’t do a lot of flying back then. I was more interested in swimming and getting my lifesaving certificate.” But Gwinn’s interest in flying grew. Under her father’s tutelage, she soloed at age 16 and got her private pilot’s license in 1937. A short time later, she earned a flight instructor rating through a program at Concord. As the Depression darkened and war clouds loomed, “Pence Springs ran out of people who flew,” Gwinn said, prompting her and her father to sign on as cadet instructors at the Princeton airport.
Husband in New Guinea

While she was teaching, her husband, John, was a navigator aboard a B-25 based in New Guinea, flying low-level bombing and strafing missions against Japanese infantry positions and warships.
The couple met at a 4-H camp and married in 1938. Before joining the Air Corps, John Gwinn learned to fly, taught by his father-in-law, and then coached, taught and served as principal at Talcott High School.
After completing 65 combat missions, John Gwinn returned to the United States to attend gunnery school. Ruth quit her cadet flight instructor job to join him.
After the war, Gwinn was stationed at bases from Tokyo to Texas before retiring as an Air Force colonel in the late 1960s and returning to the Lewisburg area.
Greenbrier County officials hired John Gwinn to select the site for a new Greenbrier Valley Airport, oversee its construction, and operate the completed facility. Ruth returned to her work as a flight instructor at the small airport in Pence Springs.
She taught dozens of area residents to fly. “My most outstanding student,” she said, “was my son, Mike. He had great coordination and a real gift for flying.”
Ruth Gwinn’s days as a pilot and flight instructor ended in 1977, when a heart condition prevented her from passing an FAA-required medical exam. By then, she had logged more than 10,000 hours of flying time. “It took a long time to get used to not flying, after being involved with it for so long,” she said. “But back then, I thought I was going to die, so not flying didn’t seem all that important.”
While her husband retired as manager of Greenbrier Valley Airport in 1994, Ruth Gwinn continues to manage the Hinton-Alderson Airport at Pence Springs.
These days, its two hangars house more ultralights (eight) than airplanes (two), but it remains a place enjoyed by people who are passionate about flying.



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[sfga6970]

Very interesting story.

[sabadgeman]

A fine example of why that generation got in in life they did things that counted