Dora Dougherty Strother

Career as a WASP In 1940, Strother earned her pilot certificate via the Civilian Pilot Training Program, sponsored by the Civil Aeronautics Authority. She then became the sixth woman in the United States to earn an airline transport pilot license. The demand for male pilots in World War II opened doors for pilot training programs for women. Initially, two separate training programs were run: the Women's Auxiliary Ferrying Squadron (WAFS) was headed by Nancy Harkness Love and the 319th Women's Flying Training Detachment (WFTD) organized by Jacqueline Cochran out of Houston. The programs were merged in 1943 as Women's Airforce Service Pilots (WASP) and helmed by Cochran. Dora Jean Dougherty Strother volunteered and was selected in the third class of WASP program (43-3).

Strother's piloting jobs in the WASP program included flight training, target towing for antiaircraft gunnery, ferrying, and radio control piloting. WASPs like Strother flew almost every type of plane used by Army Air Forces such as liaison, training, and cargo aircraft. They also flew and trained other pilots to fly fighters, dive bombers, attack bombers, and very heavy bombers like the B-29. In 1944, she and fellow WASP Dorothea Johnson Moorman were selected by Lt. Col. Paul W. Tibbets to learn to fly the Boeing B-29 Superfortress heavy bomber. The plane was considered dangerous and cumbersome, and Tibbets believed the two women could learn to fly the four-engine plane to showcase its reliability. After four days of flight training, Tibbets certified Strother and Moorman for the B-29, some of the few women to fly the type for decades. They flew the B-29 from Birmingham, Alabama , to Clovis, New Mexico. There they took male crews on flights and further trained them, demonstrating the feasibility of flying the B-29 for a few days, and the crews' attitude towards the B-29 improved. Then Air Staff Major General Barney Giles stopped the program. In thirty-four hours of helicopter flight time, she set two world records for altitude (19,406 feet) and distance (straight line 404.36 miles). Strother held these rotorcraft records from 1961 to 1966.