On September 10, 1942, the U.S. Army Air Forces’ Air Transport Command established the Women’s Auxiliary Ferrying Squadron, opening a new chapter in American military aviation by allowing civilian women pilots to fly for their country for the first time. Considered one of the most significant breakthroughs for women in the U.S. armed forces, the squadron’s founding marked the culmination of years of advocacy by pioneering aviators who had long argued that skilled female pilots could ease a wartime shortage of men behind the controls.

The push to create the WAFS began well before America entered the war. As early as 1940, aviator Nancy Harkness Love had approached the Army with a list of qualified women pilots, proposing that they be allowed to ferry aircraft from factories to military bases. Her early efforts were rejected, but as the war intensified and the Air Transport Command found itself desperately short of pilots, the idea gained new traction. In September 1942, the Army approved the formation of the WAFS, appointed Love as its commander, and sent a telegram to dozens of experienced American women pilots inviting them to join.

The squadron’s ranks were never large, never numbering more than 28 women at any one time. Still, the qualifications required to join were demanding. Applicants needed a commercial pilot’s license and a minimum of 500 flying hours, standards far higher than those expected of male military pilots at the time. The first 28 women, known ever after as “the Originals,” began reporting for duty within days of the squadron’s creation and started flying out of New Castle Army Air Field in Wilmington, Delaware, that same month.

The founding of the WAFS did not happen in isolation. Around the same time, celebrated aviator Jacqueline Cochran was appointed to direct a separate training program for women pilots, the Women’s Flying Training Detachment, based at Avenger Field in Sweetwater, Texas. The two programs operated in parallel for nearly a year, training and fielding women who ferried aircraft, towed targets, and tested planes fresh off assembly lines, freeing male pilots for combat duty overseas.

The WAFS’s independent existence was relatively short-lived. In August 1943, Love’s ferrying squadrons merged with Cochran’s training program to form the Women Air Force Service Pilots, or WASP, with Cochran named director of the combined organization and Love placed in charge of all ferrying operations. Under the WASP banner, more than 1,000 women would go on to fly nearly every type of aircraft used by the American military during the war, logging tens of millions of miles in service before the program was disbanded in December 1944.

Unlike Women’s Equality Day, there is no federally designated holiday marking September 10 as a national day of observance for the founding of the WAFS. Even so, the date holds enduring significance for aviation historians, military researchers, and the dwindling community connected to the WASP legacy, who look back on it as the moment America first opened its cockpits to women in uniform. Museums and veterans’ organizations continue to mark the anniversary with retrospectives honoring the Originals and the thousands of women who followed in their path.

More than eight decades later, September 10 remains a date worth remembering, for the barriers Nancy Harkness Love and her fellow aviators broke down, for the quiet but essential wartime work performed by the WAFS and WASP pilots, and for the long, uneven road that followed as women continued fighting for full recognition within the American military, a fight that would not fully succeed until Congress granted WASP veterans official military status decades later, in 1977.