Texas and Chicago, March 1944
After winning the custody battle and seeing Tim, Barbara was assigned to a new job for the WAFS at Randolph Field in San Antonio, Texas, the "West Point of the Air."
Back at Avenger Field, she and others had flown B-26's that were called "widow-makers," and un-air worthy crates trailing targets for inexperienced ground gunners to fire at. They often had to alert their male navigators to turn the plane around over the Gulf of Mexico or run out of fuel and end up in the drink. And they flew planes from which male bombardier trainees, many of them washouts from flight school, dropped live bombs on targets in the desert.
Though many male pilots resented WAFS because the women had a better safety and nonfatal flying accident rate than they, there was one job they gladly gave up to pilots of the opposite sex. The job, of extreme importance at any flight training base in America, was that of test pilot. Male pilots didn't want to risk their lives before going into combat by flying planes on training missions that might not be safe. If they were going to be killed in a crash, they'd rather die in combat, so they preferred to let someone else test the planes before they took them up.
On many bases, the job of making sure the trainer planes that male cadets learned on were safe then fell to WASPS, and Barbara became one of the pilots who test-flew those planes.
Most of the planes needed repairs of one kind or another; some had broken propellers, a wing might need repair, some didn't balance properly in flight, strange noises needed to be reported, and in some the engines simply exploded.
After a tornado damaged most of the training planes, Barbara was assigned to test one of them whose right wing had been repaired. The right wing had been torn off from hitting another plane on the ground.
Just after takeoff, Barbara felt the plane pull wildly to the right. Unable to stabilize it, while flying over the airfield, she cut the engine, nosed the plane down, and made a forced landing.
Shaken but glad to be alive, Barbara got herself a cup of hot black coffee while a maintenance crew tried to figure out why the repaired plane still needed work. It wasn't until the next day that she learned why the plane had pulled wildly to the right. A mechanic had accidentally riveted his fifty-pound tool chest into the replaced right wing.
It didn't help Barbara's morale, or her fellow female pilots when, after ferrying planes to distant airfields or test-piloting flying coffins, they were harassed on the ground. Some restaurants refused to serve them because they entered wearing their tan gabardine slacks and white shirts. "We don't serve women in pants," they were told.