VALUABLE WORK

Wairarapa Times-Age, 8 July 1942, Page 4

VALUABLE WORK

UNDERTAKEN BY WOMEN IN WAR-TIME. AIRWAYS CORPORATION SERVICE. A woman trained to compute the time of sunset and sunrise and the duration of twilight in any part of the world is one of the many who have taken over men’s work in the British Overseas Airways Corporation, the Empire’s merchant air service. Before the war she was an income tax official. Today, the only woman computer, she reckons out various averages of air speed and height, and, more difficult still, makes a reliable wind analysis. Women are also being used by the corporation with outstanding success as map draughtsmen, a job requiring great skill and accuracy. Twenty of them in the operations department have prepared between them since war broke out no fewer than 5000 special maps to be carried by the corporation’s aircraft captains. There are also women architects, who work out designs for factory extensions; young girls in overalls who spend long days helping to strip and overhaul aero engines and propellers; tracers, teleprinter operators, motor transport drivers and traffic clerks. In the corporations’ factories women are working on fabric, bench fittings, sub-assembly of propellers and aero engines, viewing, stripping and cleaning and even balancing propellers. Place has been found for married women by giving them a job which enables them to take time off for domestice duties. One of them, now working as a storekeeper, seldom meets her, husband for more than a few minutes, as he is on night duty as a coal-miner. But he does not mind because they like doing war work. “In the morning I cook a meal for my husband,” she says, “and in the evening he cooks one for me.”