By Betty “Tack” Blake, www.airman.dodlive.mil
Betty “Tack” Blake was a Women’s Air Force Service pilot during World War II and a graduate of the first graduating class in 1943 near Ellington Field in Houston. Almost 80 years later, she still remembers the day she met Amelia Earhart.
Betty "Tack" Blake, 91, holds a model of a P-51 Mustang, her favorite aircraft to fly, in front of her home in Scottsdale, Ariz. Blake joined the first class of WAFs. During World War II, she was assigned as a transport pilot, ferrying 36 different types of aircraft across America. (U.S. Air Force photo by Tech. Sgt. Bennie J. Davis III)
Amelia Earhart came to the islands for two or three days, and she gave a talk at the [University of Hawaii]. I was only 14, so I couldn’t drive, but I was already learning to fly. My father drove me to the university, and I was the only kid who was there that night, so they put me in the front row.
So she stood right in front of me as she talked, and it seemed like she was talking right to me. When the talk was finished, all the people lined up to shake her hand and talk to her. As soon as she got through talking to everybody, she came and sat beside me.
We had dinner afterward, and she was going to take off the next day for Australia, so she invited me out to the airport to sit inside her twin-engine Beechcraft. She showed me all the instruments and we had quite a discussion. Then, I watched her take off.
She started off the runway and had just gotten off the ground and pulled the throttle back when she landed and taxied back. I was standing on the front row with her engineer and her husband in front of the hangar, and she taxied her airplane right in front of us and turned the engines off.
The night before, when she stood right in front me, she was tall and slim with short, kind of tousled hair, and a very soft, gentle voice. But when she stepped out of the plane on the wing after her problem taking off, the four letter words that came out of her mouth, I’d never heard before. She was angry and apparently thought one of the ground crew hadn’t done something right to her plane. She was two different people, the one from the night before when she spoke at the university, and the other when she was angry.
But she was very excited to know I was learning to fly. She told me to keep going and go on to do something exciting and show that women could fly. She had a lot of people fighting against her who didn’t think women could do it.
