Flying into Yesterday: My Search for the Curtiss-Wright Aeronautical
Engineering Cadettes

Foreword
     In February 1943, the
Curtiss-Wright Airplane Company, then America’s largest aircraft
manufacturer, began training and employing women in aeronautical
engineering. These "Sisters of Icarus," 918 women who were chosen to
stay firmly on the ground perfecting planes while their brothers flew into
combat (and all too frequently went down in flames), were known as the
Curtiss-Wright Engineering Cadettes. My mother, Ricki Cruse Lenthe, was
one of them.
     This story is my attempt to
assemble a clearer picture about her life as a Cadette, the lifelong
friends she made during that time, and the door that opened during WWII,
if only briefly, for women to co-create the shape of aviation. After a
diligent search for historical documents, three dozen interviews with
surviving Cadettes and Curtiss-Wright male employees, and hours of
discussion with some of my mother’s closest Cadette friends, I know that
what these female engineers accomplished " in the universities and in
the airplane plants " contained the seeds of a bona fide revolution. In
an amazingly short period of time (February 1943 through August 1945),
they proved the capability of women in a field that had previously been
labeled male-only territory. They also bailed out a company whose planes
were vital to winning WWII. Without them, the war would have dragged on
even longer.
     Cadette engineers labored
six days a week in five different Curtiss-Wright plants, as well as in the
company’s research lab in Buffalo, New York. But at the end of the war,
company management treated their vital contributions as a mere wartime
aberration. Forgotten were all the promises of promoting the Cadettes and
helping them upgrade to full "graduate engineer" status "when the
peace for which we are all fighting is won." But the Cadettes knew their
value. If they hadn’t been forced to by law and company pressure, a
great many of them would not have gone home after the war.
     Like the skewed or
minimized record of other thwarted revolutions (usually demoted to "revolts"
by the writers of history), the pages describing the Cadette Program in
detail were cut from Curtiss-Wright’s WWII record with such a
razor-sharp edge that you almost can’t tell they were ever there. This
aviation mega-company that the Cadettes helped salvage from its own
engineering deficiencies in a time of national crisis retained no
documentation of their impressive achievements. In fact, corporate memory
of the Cadettes is now so well excised that a few years ago an employee at
Curtiss-Wright corporate headquarters responded to an inquiry about the
Cadettes with indignation: "We don’t know who in the world you’re
talking about. It’s certainly not our Curtiss-Wright."
The military’s "fog of amnesia" is almost as dense. Neither the Navy
nor the Army remembers approving the training initially; nor do they
recall that inspectors of naval aircraft (INAs) in the Columbus plant
signed off on the work of Cadettes who had competently inspected both sub-
and final airframe assemblies. You will certainly never see references to
the Cadette Program in WWII history books. Only the women themselves and
the universities that trained them retained any written documentation on
the Cadette Program. 

Cadettes Invade
Campus[1]
     Forty years after Orville
and Wilbur first took to the air in the Wright Flyer 1, there was a
blizzard in progress in West Lafayette, Ind., with almost six inches of
snow already on the ground. It was February 12, 1943, and 98 young women
were arriving by train from schools all over the South, the Midwest, the
Northeast, and Appalachia. They had each completed at least a year of
college and were ranked in the top third of their math classes and the top
half in everything else. Somewhere . . .