Before carrying out the research for this article, I had never heard of Betty Greene but she was clearly an amazing person and I hope you will be as inspired as I was when you read her story.
Betty Greene was born in Seattle in 1920 and her fascination with becoming a pilot began at an early age. She was also a devout Presbyterian who enjoyed ministering in her church’s youth group, and she sensed that God had called her to use airplanes to further her missionary work, although at the time, there was no such thing as mission aviation.
When World War II began, women were restricted from flying combat missions, so Betty did the next best thing and joined the Women’s Airforce Service Pilots (WASP). As a WASP aviator, Greene and over a thousand other women took on non-combat flying duties that were often still hazardous but left the male pilots free to fly in combat.
After WASP was disbanded at the end of the war, Greene moved to California and helped found the Missionary Aviation Fellowship which was a group of Christian pilots from the UK, America, Canada, New Zealand and Australia who saw the increasing usefulness of air transportation in the mission field.
The honour of MAF’s first flight fell to Greene in 1946, when, in partnership with Wycliffe Bible Translators in Mexico, she flew missionaries in a Waco biplane to a remote part of Mexico.
Between the late 1940s and 1960s, Greene ferried missionaries to some of Mexico’s and South America’s most out-of-the-way settlements and and became the first woman to fly across the Andes. Greene also piloted MAF aircraft while based in Nigeria and New Guinea and was the first woman to pilot an aircraft in Sudan after the Sudanese Parliament had to proclaim a dispensation allowing her to fly.
Greene died of Alzheimer’s at the age of 76 on April 10th 1997 at her home on Lake Washington near Seattle.