When male pilots refused to fly the new B-29 Superfortress because its engines kept catching fire, General Hap Arnold had two women fly it and land it flawlessly in front of them, and the grumbling stopped. Yet if one of those women had died in service, the military would not have paid to ship her body home, her family could not hang a gold star, and no flag could drape her coffin. This episode pieces together the biography of the Women Airforce Service Pilots, from the rival visions of Jacqueline Cochran and Nancy Harkness Love to the civil service loophole that let the Army use them without giving them military status, insurance, or medical benefits.

Of more than 25,000 applicants, 1,074 women graduated and went on to ferry over 12,600 aircraft across 78 models, test repaired combat planes, and tow live-fire targets at Camp Davis, where a commander called them and their planes expendable. The episode covers the deaths of 38 WASPs, including Mabel Rawlinson’s fatal crash in a plane with a defective canopy latch, the lobbying campaign by displaced male instructors that killed militarization in June 1944, the disbanding before Christmas that year, 35 years of sealed records, and the long fight that won veteran status in 1977, the Congressional Gold Medal in 2009, and Arlington burial rights in 2016.

• Zoot suits, hair nets, and 23 different training aircraft at Avenger Field in Sweetwater, Texas
• Who got in: mostly wealthy white women, two Chinese-American pilots, an Oglala Sioux pilot, and Black applicants turned away
• Wrong-octane fuel, suspected sugar in an engine, and why the non-combat label was a semantic trick
• Pilots grounded during menstruation until thousands of hours of flight data forced a reversal
• How a 1970s Air Force press release about the first women military pilots ignited the Battle of Congress