STRAUGHAN, JANE (24 August 1913–12 March 2007), women’s aviation pioneer. Born in Washington, DC, Jane was two when her mother died; her father raised her and her two siblings. In 1937 she married Alfred Straughan and the couple soon developed such a keen interest in flying that they made some novel choices in their household economizing during the Depression: “I wanted to save for a small house,” Jane would later say. “We made an agreement. I would solo and if I didn’t like flying, we would buy a house. I soloed in 1938, and we bought a Cub [a light aircraft].”
After obtaining her flying license Straughan joined the Ninety-Nines, an organization of all-female pilots founded in 1929 by Amelia Earhart. During World War II she became one of the twenty-three inaugural members of the Women Airforce Service Pilots (WASPs), female civil-service employees trained to fly noncombat military aircraft in order to free up male pilots for combat duty. She was assigned to the New Castle Army Air Base in Wilmington, Delaware, whence she flew fighter planes, bombers, and transportation aircraft around the US and Canada.
The WASPs were decommissioned in 1945, and it was not until 1977 that a woman would fly a US-military aircraft again. After the war Straughan worked briefly for the Air Safety Division of the Civil Aeronautic Board before settling into a long career at the Social Security Administration. She died at the age of ninety-three, having logged over two hundred hours of flight time in her life.