Memories of Days in the Sky

Rita McArdle with a photo of herself, standing, in 1939. The seated womean is unidentified. (Newsday Photo/Thomas A. Ferrara)

Rita McArdle was a student pilot in 1939 when a photographer stopped by Roosevelt Field and asked her and another woman to pose by a Piper Cub trainer.

That photo made it into the files of the Long Island Studies Institute without caption information. However, after the photo was published Jan. 17 as a "History Mystery," a family friend identified McArdle, who, standing, wears jodhpurs and a suede jacket.

McArdle, of Huntington, doesn't know who the other woman in the photo is, but she has fond memories of those days.

Then Rita Moynahan, she was a student at New York University majoring in French when she decided to try a government flight course in 1939. She took ground training at NYU and flight training at Roosevelt Field -- decades before it was a shopping mall.

After graduating from NYU in 1940, she worked for American Airlines in reservations, meteorology and air traffic control. Ground jobs all. But she held a commercial pilot's license and longed to fly. When World War II began, she was asked to join the WASPs -- Women's Airforce Service Pilots, a group that flew aircraft at home while men flew in combat overseas.

McArdle would fly planes to various U.S. destinations for shipment to Europe and the Pacific. Some aircraft came from Republic Aviation in Farmingdale.

On some days she might fly a P-47 fighter from Long Island to Newark, N.J., and return to Long Island in a car to do it again -- perhaps five times in a single day.

Paid $300 a month, she lived at home with her family in Forest Hills or in nurses' quarters or hotels. "We were on 24-hour call. It was no vacation," she says.

One time she was flying a Piper Cub to Texas when her propeller fell off at 5,000 feet. She landed safely in a cotton field ("I still have some cotton") while another pilot on the same route notified rescuers. Sabotage was suspected, she says, and several planes were grounded for an investigation.

She was proud to serve at a time when her brother Jack was flying for the Navy in the Pacific and her brother Bernard was serving in Europe. Bernard, a lieutenant in the infantry, was killed by sniper fire in Italy.

Her service ended in 1944 and she returned to American Airlines. With some 3,000 hours of flight experience, she says she asked the head of the airline for a pilot's job. But she was a woman.

"He said, `I couldn't do that. It would set a precedent,"' she recalls. "He couldn't do that today."

McArdle, 79, is retired from the Veterans Administration hospital in Northport, where she handled medical records. She has three children and four grandchildren.

About flying, she says, "I look at it with very pleasant memories. I loved it and I felt I was doing something, a small part, in the war effort. There's no feeling like it, to be flying."