Spitfire Girl Joy, 94, dies – 70 years after she f lew fighters to the frontline
ONE of the last surviving ‘Spitfire Girls’ has died at the age of 94.
Joy Lofthouse was one of only 164 women pilots in the Air Transport Auxiliary during the Second World War.
She became one of ‘the Attagirls’ in 1943 at the age of 20, delivering aircraft for frontline service.
The small group of women pilots were based at White Waltham in Berkshire and were trained to fly 38 types of aircraft between factories and military airfields across the country.
They had to convince the RAF they could be trusted in the cockpit, but once they did, their bosses realised the valuable contribution they were making to the war effort.
The Attagirls were not allowed to fly in combat, but were occasionally caught up in dogfights. Their main enemy was bad weather, which claimed many of them.
Mrs Lofthouse, one of Britain’s first women Spitfire pilots, joined the ATA with her older sister Yvonne after spotting a notice in a magazine calling for women to learn to fly.
Neither she nor Yvonne, whose bomber pilot husband had been killed over Berlin, had any flying experience when they joined. Mrs Lofthouse had never even driven a car. But she ended up piloting almost 20 RAF aircraft during the war, including Spitfires and Hurricanes.
Mrs Lofthouse once said: ‘When the war broke out all our boyfriends would talk about was flying. So when we saw the advert we both decided to apply. In many ways we were trailblazers for female pilots in the RAF.
‘To be perfectly honest, I wanted the war to go on as long as possible. Wartime gave many women something they’d never had: independence, earning your own money, being your own person. You have to remember that as young girls, the emphasis for us had always been on marriage and children. So being able to go into the Forces to be taught to fly was virtually undreamed of.’
She added: ‘The weather was our biggest enemy. There were a couple of times when I thought I’d lost one of my nine lives.’
After the war, Mrs Lofthouse, from South Cerney in Gloucestershire, became a teacher, married twice and had three children. Her second husband, Charles Lofthouse, a former RAF bomber pilot, died in 2002. She hit the headlines in May 2015 after flying a Spitfire for the first time in 70 years to mark VE Day. Then aged 92, she was accompanied by a co-pilot who controlled take-off and landing but allowed her to take over while they were in the air.
At the time she told the BBC that the Spitfire was her favourite plane. She said: ‘It’s the nearest thing to having wings of your own and flying. It was the iconic plane.’
In November last year, she and fellow ATA pilot Mary Ellis were honoured at the annual Festival of Remembrance at the Royal Albert Hall in London.