No!, she amended again.The gorgeous dear! After B-17 training, Barbara had hopes of putting her newly learned experience to practice, ferrying Flying Fortresses across the country. Instead she was assigned to the most dangerous job she had yet undertaken as a women ferrying pilot.
She joined two dozen other WASPs at Camp Davis, North Carolina where they replaced male pilots for combat duty. The job they took over for the men at the anti-aircraft artillery training base was to tow targets that GIs would try to shoot down. They also were to fly their planes like the enemy as much as possible, and this included flying low and night target practice.
Barbara soon mastered the technique of flying at low altitude, dragging a twenty-foot muslin sleeve target behind her A-24 Douglas Dauntless, a popular dive bomber used in low-target flying. But most of the planes had old tires, their instruments could not be relied upon, and their engines were overworked.
On top of the uncertainties of flying a Dauntless in live target practice, the WASPS were also ordered to fly search-and-rescue missions. Sometimes, male pilots in training at Camp Davis were forced to ditch their planes in surrounding swamps full of bugs, snakes, and larger creatures.
Some of the other planes were even less safe to fly than the Dauntless. One WASP, Mabel Rawlinson, who had been a librarian in Kalamazoo, Michigan, was flying a night mission in an A-24 when it began to shudder in midair. It crashed into the swamp, and on impact cracked in two and burst into flames. Mabel could not escape because of a faulty canopy latch and perished in the fire.
Jackie Cochran came from Washington to check on the airplanes herself and attend the funeral. It was discovered that more than half of the planes including Mabel Rawlinson's were far from being in safe flying condition. Yet the WAFS were even expected to teach male pilots bombing and machine-gun strafing techniques in them.
While some effort was made to return all the base planes to safer flying condition, the WASPS themselves were blamed for Mabel Rawlinson's death and they were grounded for several days. Afterward, they were assigned to fly more gunnery missions, but only in small L4s and L5s.
However, only five days after the funeral, Barbara and several of her friends were assigned to flying missions to train anti-aircraft artillery gunners. One WASP reported that her plane was shot at, and it was learned that a gunner thought he was supposed to shoot at planes with a cloth marker. "So much for his gunnery instruction," the WASP pilot remarked.