Denton County Magazine • Sept_Oct 23 • Katherine Sharp Landdeck

When Katherine Sharp Landdeck was growing up in Omaha, Nebraska, she spent hours watching Air Force planes and other aircraft from the area fly overhead daily. She came to love aviation (and history), and after college, got a job teaching history and government at the Spartan School of Aeronautics in Tulsa, Oklahoma.

Landdeck’s future literally took flight soon after. She decided to take a road trip to attend an air show in Bartlesville, Oklahoma, and had a chance encounter with pilot and aircraft designer Curtis Pitts. He introduced her to Caro Bailey Bosca, a member of the Women Airforce Service Pilots (WASP) from World War II.

The future Texas Woman’s University historian cruised back to Tulsa in her 1973 Super Beetle, windows down, and realized she was driving toward a new journey that would change her life.

“When I got back from the air show, I discovered no one at the flight school had ever heard of the WASP,” said Landdeck, who also had been unaware of them. “That’s it, I thought. It was ridiculous that no one had ever heard of these women. I wanted to change that.”

Landdeck, who earned her private pilot’s license and also freelanced articles for magazines like “Flight Training” and “Flight Journal,” decided she wanted to learn how to best tell the story of the more than 1,100 women who became pilots and flew plans and equipment stateside during World War II.

Although they weren’t recognized as veterans until 1977, the WASP flew military missions coast to coast from 1942 to 1944; many trained in Sweetwater, Texas.

Graduate school was the next step in Landdeck’s journey. She wanted to share the history of the WASP and has influenced the body of knowledge and attention the women have received over the past 30 years.

“I started graduate school at the University of Tennessee to learn how to write the WASP story,” Landdeck said. “My research, which began in 1993, included a trip to an air show in Oshkosh, Wisconsin, where I met with more WASP members and talked with them about their experiences.”

The future TWU professor of history wanted to delve deeper into the story of the WASP. “I recorded 115 individual oral histories and sent more than 200 questionnaires during the 1990s, plus follow-ups and interviews,” she said.

Landdeck wrote her thesis and dissertation on the WASP, and writing a book about this historic group of women was a natural next step. With a draft that was too long and a desire to avoid writing a stiff academic textbook, she started again – deciding to pen a nonfiction narrative that would reach more readers and broaden awareness of the WASP.

“My driving vision is to educate as many people as possible about the WASP. You really can’t do that with an academic textbook,” she said. “It is good scholarship, but I wrote it in a style to educate the general public.”

Landdeck’s husband, who is a pilot and mechanic, talked her through the technicalities of each plane mentioned in her book. In April 2020, the book was published with the title, “The Women with Silver Wings: The Inspiring True Story of the Women Airforce Service Pilots in World War II.”

The news media took notice when the book was published, and so did the Smithsonian Institute. She accepted an invitation from its National Air and Space Museum to be the featured speaker for the Amelia Earhart Lecture, considered the premier lecture series on aviation history.

Discovering that you really can go home again – because she was a Guggenheim Fellow at the Smithsonian Institute in 2000 during graduate school – Landdeck presented her discussion, “Jacqueline Cochran: Pilot, Leader, Myth,” and autographed copies of her book this spring.

As more people learn about the WASP, Landdeck believes her work has helped influence several events in recent years, including a WASP float in the 2014 Rose Parade that reunited its members; the award of the Congressional Gold Medal in 2010 to the group; and Congressional approval in 2016 making WASP members eligible for burial in Arlington National Cemetery.

TWU’s library holds the WASP archives, and Landdeck brought more than 100 WASP and at least 200 of their family members to TWU for the final WASP reunion in 2008. One hundred U.S. Air Force Reservists served as aides to the group as they toured a permanent WASP exhibit at TWU as well as the Frontiers of Flight Museum in Dallas.

And Landdeck’s experience with documentary filmmaking as well as news media interviews has brought additional attention from outlets including PBS, NPR, CBS, CNN, the Washington Post, The New York Times, USA Today, the History Channel, C-SPAN, A&E and many more.

Currently, Landdeck serves on the advisory board for the National Medal of Honor Museum (under construction in Arlington, Texas), while she works with the news media, teaches courses on 20thcentury American history and global war, oversees the TWU history department’s internship program and directs the Pioneers Oral History Project.

While Landdeck’s first book tour was canceled by COVID in 2020, she plans to hit the road again to promote her next book in 2025 about American flight nurses in World War II.

But she still marvels at the sequence of events early in her career that led her from aviation to the WASP to higher education and more research.

“I’ve always liked history, and I’ve always loved airplanes. After my trip to the Bartlesville air show, it just hit me like a lightning bolt. If I hadn’t gone by myself to that air show, I never would have met (Curtis) Pitts and a WASP. Perhaps everything that followed would have never happened.”

Landdeck doesn’t drive that old Super Beetle anymore, but she hits the road for adventure regularly, enjoying where she’s been and where she’s going now.

doctoral and master’s degrees in history, University of Tennessee; undergraduate degrees in history and political science, University of Arkansas at Little Rock; Spartan College of Aeronautics

“I was an NCAA Division I soccer player for the University of Arkansas at Little Rock many, many, many years ago.”