KEY POINTS:
June Gummer, pilot. Died aged 88.
June Gummer is believed to have been the last of a small group of Kiwi women pilots who ferried new or repaired aircraft to airfields throughout England during World War II.
The Air Transport Auxiliary involved 15 ferry pools of men and
women pilots scattered about the country. June Howden, as she was then, delivered hundreds of planes and flew 22 different types of aircraft, mostly Spitfires.
It was no surprise that she was attracted to such flying. When she was 12, she watched a Captain Hewett in his Gipsy Moth "looping the loop" over Waiuku, where her father was a doctor. She went up for a ride with him afterwards and was hooked.
At 17, while at school at Waikato Diocesan for Girls, she won a New Zealand Herald flying scholarship. The event was regarded as a sufficient sensation for a celebratory cake to be baked at the school. Pupils were also given a half-day to go to the movies.
Mrs Gummer recalled that after she went solo, a flight over the school brought pupils out of their classes. They called her "Aeroplane Howden".
Joining the WAAF in New Zealand in 1941, at 23, she found little or no prospect of women being allowed to fly. She was posted to Woodbourne near Blenheim as Airwoman of the Watch in the duty pilot's watch tower. The job included signalling to young pilots in Harvards preparing to land with their wheels still up.
One morning after night flying practice, a Harvard was found returned with a third of a wing missing. Then a farmer rang up and asked for the Air Force to pay for repairs to his fence on top of a ridge.
It was after the young New Zealander heard that the Air Transport Auxiliary was using some women flyers that she went to England and was allowed to join, even though the minimum height was 5ft 4in (1.6m) and she was only 1.58m.
Although the flying work was non-combatant, it was not without risk. An estimated 173 men and women died, often because of the treacherous weather. They included the famed aviatrix Amy Johnson and one of the four Kiwi women flying in the service, Jane Winstone, from Wanganui.
Mrs Gummer recalled times when a priority aircraft for replacement at a station with high losses could mean flying in marginal conditions. But she added: "By jove, I really admired those pilots who were flying in danger - the real thing. It was terrifying what those chaps went through."
Back home after the war, Mrs Gummer continued flying.
She and her husband Bob, a wartime fighter pilot in the Pacific and later a topdressing pilot, farmed in the King Country before retiring to Tutukaka near Whangarei in 1974.
Of her time at war, Mrs Gummer later wrote: "I felt I was doing something worthwhile with what skills I had and I did something I could never do in peacetime.
"I once dreamed of flying around England in a Tiger Moth but never dreamed I'd get to do it in a Spitfire."
June Gummer is survived by her husband Bob, a son and twin daughters.
