‘You will get lost in this fog,’ a fellow seafarer warned the Love family. Nancy, her husband, and children were in Florida having lunch when the dense fog layer rolled in and reduced visibility to a mere two feet. Hannah, her daughter, recalls that Nancy did not heed the seafarer’s advice. Instead, she spread out the map on an icebox and got to work plotting a course to Sarasota, FL. The family boarded their modest sailboat and tracked their way going from buoy to buoy with each person playing his or her part on the vessel. This was a testament to her exceptional navigation skills, which were hard earned after many years of breaking barriers in the cockpit of an airplane.
Nancy Harkness Love was born Hannah Lincoln Harkness in Houghton, Michigan on February 14, 1914. She was named after her renowned ancestors on her mother’s side, Benjamin Lincoln, and his daughter Hannah Lincoln. Major-General Benjamin Lincoln is known for accepting General Cornwallis’ sword when he surrendered, effectively ending the Revolutionary War. Her father, Dr. Robert Harkness, was a 6’4” Scottish physician who preferred the name Nancy and it stuck. The family landed in the Upper Peninsula of Michigan because her mother’s family had purchased several plots of land during the copper mining boom, and the community had need of a Public Health Officer for Houghton County. Dr. Harkness had an office in downtown Houghton (then 87 Sheldon) but made frequent house calls in the community and was often paid in goods like eggs and vegetables. Alice, Nancy’s mother, was often tending to the household, but when she was not, Nancy and her brother Robert Jr had a Finnish babysitter. Alice, like her husband, was also a tall woman of 6’. Alice’s granddaughter, who also is named Hannah Robinson (nee Love), recalls Alice knitting argyle socks, reading Doctor Zhivago, and all the while successfully outwitting her husband in Scrabble. Perhaps Nancys skill with aircraft controls were acquired from her mother’s dexterous hobbies. According to Hannah, during periods of heavy snowfall Nancy would jump from the second story window into the massive snowbanks by the house (then 253 College Ave). The family home was kept until around 1948 when they moved to Pennsylvania.
In 1930, a sixteen-year-old Nancy was out riding her horse when she spotted a biplane fly over. Three years earlier, she was at Le Bourget Field in Paris with her aunt when Charles Lindberg landed the Spirit ofSt. Louis. Around this period, Amelia Earheart became the first woman to cross the Atlantic in an airplane as a passenger. Nancy’s spark for aviation was not lit until she took flight with the barnstormer. He charged her a penny per pound for a ride over her town, and after that, the course of her life turned skyward. After convincing her parents, Nancy received her private pilot training with Jimmy Hansen of Upper Peninsula Airways in a Kinner Fleet biplane. Her first cross country flight brought them to Escanaba, MI and she earned her private pilot’s license #17,797 at the tender age of sixteen. They crossed paths later in life during the war before he tragically went down ferrying an aircraft that suffered a mechanical issue.
Nancy attended Milton Academy in Massachusetts, and Vassar in New York. It took two days to get to Milton by train so visits home were infrequent. In school she was considered a perfectionist but not competitive, and preferred dancing to sports. A few distinct events influenced Nancy to grow into a pilot that valued safety over speed and aerobatics. One day she took her brother Bob up in a rented single engine aircraft. Bob, who was a staggering 6’7” must have had less legroom than 5’6” Nancy. He dared her to buzz the neighboring boys’ prep school, and she pointed the nose toward campus. She pulled up just in time to miss the chapel, but some roof slates did shimmy loose, earning Nancy the title ‘The Flying Freshman’. In another instance, she was working toward her commercial license with her instructor, John Miller, in a Great Lakes two-seater when the engine failed. They hit a tree and crashed upside down across a stone wall. John was badly cut and lost an eye. Nancy suffered a concussion and had frequent headaches thereafter. Not long after the accident, her tell-tale grey streak of hair crept into her dark curls.
Nancy Harkness Love in Airplane
Image provided by Hannah Love Robinson
When the Great Depression descended on America, Robert and Alice lost their capital in Seneca Copper stock. Tragedy struck the family. Robert Harkness Jr was killed in a skiing accident in 1933 at twenty-seven. After Bob’s death, their mother Alice suffered from a nervous breakdown, which was only seen then as a woman’s weakness. Nancy was forced to drop out of Vassar and began giving plane rides in Poughkeepsie, and later found work in Boston.
In 1934 she met her future husband, Air Corps Reserve officer Robert Love. Nancy had been selling airplanes in Boston for Beechcraft and then Waco with customers including Joseph Kennedy, Sr. Their marriage was suited, and the Loves built Inter City Aviation with much success. Her father always told her if she was to do something, to do it well. Indeed, she did. Nancy Harkness Love helped design the tricycle landing gear when she was a test pilot for Gwinn Aircar. When flying for the Bureau of Air Commerce she headed a project that created navigational aids for pilots. She flew around the United States convincing farmers and villages to paint their barns and water towers, helping everyone from commercial airlines to mail carriers.
All the while tensions were rising, and in 1939 WWII broke out in Europe. Love wrote to Lieutenant Colonel Robert Olds to see if she could put together a female aircraft ferrying squadron to transport planes from factories to bases. She already had forty-nine superb candidates, each with upwards of a thousand hours ready to fly, but she was turned down. With a little luck and a good word from her husband, who was Deputy Chief of Staff of the American Ferry Command, the WAFS (Women’s Auxiliary Ferry Squadron) were born, and Nancy qualified as the first female pilot in the Army Air Forces. The WAFS began with twenty-seven female pilots, with a twenty-eight-year-old Nancy Love in command. Nancy’s family later discovered a treasure trove of handwritten letters, newspaper clippings, and photographs of the women under her command.
Nancy’s assertive tone concerning risk management went beyond the cockpit. She ran her squadron with a great sense of propriety and virtues, demanding professionalism and prohibiting the female fliers to accept rides from male pilots. The press did not take them seriously and eventually the War Department had to demand respect for the WAFS. They were also grounded during their menstrual periods and prevented from flying high powered aircraft. Again, Nancy advocated and won her case, which allowed women to fly with no restrictions. The WAFS reputation improved further after they began deliveries of the P-39’s, which the men had dubbed the “flying coffin”. Nancy blazed the trail as she was the first to fly many high performance combat aircraft including: the P-51 Mustang, P-38 Lightning, B-17 Flying Fortress heavy bomber, transports, and various multi-engine aircraft. In August of 1943, Love was named the WASP (Women’s Airforce Service Pilots) Executive in Air Transport Command. She was responsible for six ferrying squadrons and over three hundred women pilots.
Nancy Harkness Love Beside Her Plane
Image provided by Hannah Love Robinson
After the war Nancy and her husband had three daughters and moved to Martha’s Vineyard where she frequently flew the family in their V-tailed Bonanza. If one of her children had a doctor’s visit, they made their way to the airport and then the mainland. The family frequently hosted their fellow service members, and she continued to be a leader in the aviation industry.
Nancy Harkness Love received an Air Medal for her wartime efforts, but she passed away from cancer in 1976 before the WASPS were officially recognized as service members three years later. She was posthumously inducted into the Michigan Women’s Hall of Fame in 1997. In 2005, she was enshrined into the National Aviation Hall of Fame in Dayton, Ohio, and a statue honoring Nancy Harkness Love resides at the New Castle County Airport in Delaware. Her sublime leadership, skill, and tenacity played a critical role in the successful integration of female service pilots. Furthermore, her vision came from a practical place free of gender, where men and women stood shoulder to shoulder. Nancy will forever be remembered for her passionate belief in people and their abilities.
Nancy Love’s family still go back to the Upper Peninsula on occasion to honor her memory and it lives on through her daughter, Hannah Robinson, and grandson, who are both pilots.
Article by: Janis Brady. Janis is a pilot who grew up in Ontonagon County. She is a member of the Ninety-Nines, the International Organization of Women Pilots.
