WASP WWII Museum to be Closed for Renovations November 9 to mid-March
The WASP World War Two Museum, located in Sweetwater, will be temporarily closing so it can undergo much-needed renovations. The renovations are scheduled to commence on November 9 and last until at least mid-March.
The Women’s Airforce Service Pilots or WASP WWII Museum is located in an old circa-1929 airplane hangar and not conducive to preservation of museum artifacts. The renovations will be completed in three phases. The first phase will be a vault will be constructed of concrete with a temperature controlled humidifier.
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This phase of the multimillion-dollar project is estimated to cost about $1.5 million. Mid-March will be when Phase Two of the construction milestones are expected to be completed.
Phase 3 will include interactive exhibits.
The Women Airfare Service Pilots (WASP) began training at Avenger Field in Sweetwater. From 1942 to 1944. these pilots logged more than sixty million miles. 1,074 women received their WASP silver pilots wings at Avenger Field Avenger Field was the largest all-female air base in American history, hence the name WASP, which stood for Women Airforce Service Pilots. The origins of the base date to the 1920s as the Sweetwater Municipal Airport. Besides piloting planes, women were expected to take ground courses. The required courses included such things as aerodynamics, hydraulics, airplane maintenance, meteorology, Morse code, and physics to name only but a few. WASPs were required to have seventy hours each in primary and advanced training. They practiced various techniques, such as take-offs, landings, parachute bailouts, aerobatics, snap rolls, night flying and cross country flying. Male instructors at Avenger Field wondered aloud if the women, who, as a requirement, all had pilot’s licenses and prior flying experience really could fly military planes, while the male pilots worried privately that they could.
Avenger Field remained a WASP training facility until the base closed in December of 1944. By then, one thousand and seventy four women pilots had been trained, including thirty-seven who heroically gave their lives in service to their country. More than twenty-five thousand women applied for the WASP, and fewer than 1,900 were accepted. In late December of that year, with America winning the war, the WASP program was deemed nonessential to the war effort. Unfortunately, the WASPs were summarily discharged from their military duties and returned to civilian life with no veterans’ benefits. Their records were sealed, marked classified and stored away. So much so was their story untold, that in 1976, the Air Force absurdly announced that women were finally getting the chance to fly military aircraft for “the first time” in U.S. military history. Something had to be done. The WASPs united to tell their story. Such was the heat, that in 1977 Congress finally fixed the government’s egregious error and granted benefits to the nearly nine-hundred remaining WASPs.