Editorial Note: From Balloons to Drones is pleased to announce our new podcast series. Led by our Editor Dr Mike Hankins, the series builds on the success of From Balloons to Drones, and provides an outlet for the presentation and evaluation of air power scholarship, the exploration of historical topics and ideas, and provides a way to reach out to both new scholars and the general public. You can find our Soundcloud channel here.
In this episode, we interview Katherine Sharp Landdeck, who is here to tell us all about the WASPs, the Women Airforce Service Pilots in the United States during the Second World War. She is the author of The Women with Silver Wings: The Inspiring True Story of the Women Airforce Service Pilots of World War II. She goes beyond some of the familiar figures like Jackie Cochran and Nancy Love to tell us about other, lesser-known women in the program. Furthermore, of course, we will talk about Walt Disney because Brian Laslie always finds a way!
Dr Katherine Sharp Landdeck is an associate professor of history at Texas Woman’s University, the home of the WASP archives. A Guggenheim Fellow at the Smithsonian National Air and Space Museum and a graduate of the University of Tennessee, where she earned her PhD, Landdeck has received numerous awards for her work on the WASP and has appeared as an expert on NPR’s Morning Edition, PBS, and the History channel. Her work has been published in The Washington Post, The Atlantic, and HuffPost, as well as in numerous academic and aviation publications. Landdeck is a licensed pilot who flies whenever she can.
Header Image: WASPs on the flight line at Laredo AAF, Texas, 22 January 1944. (Source: Wikimedia)
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