Mona Friedlander


Mona Friedlander or Mrs Mona Renee Vera Ernesta Forward was a British pilot and one of the eight founding pilots who started the women's section of the Air Transport Auxiliary.

Life

Friedlander was born in London in 1915. Her father was a rich banker and they lived in Park Lane.
Her parents funded her to gain a pilots license, but they were unwilling to continue when her ambition continued. She wanted to train as a flying instructor. She continued despite her parents by taking a job pulling flying banners for the summer. Some pilots would take off with the banner but Friedlander preferred to fly back at a defined height and pick up the banner. In 1939 she was working for Air Taxis Ltd of Croydon when the government used their powers to move the company to Manchester.
, Winifred Crossley, Margaret Cunnison, Hon. Margaret Fairweather, Mona Friedlander, Joan Hughes, Gabrielle Patterson, Rosemary Rees and Marion Wilberforce
She was one of the eight founding pilots who started the women's section of the Air Transport Auxiliary. The role was so new that she had to design and then get a tailor to make her uniform. Hers was based on the male uniform but with fewer pockets and in a lighter shade of blue. She did a lot of night flying as she would fly back and forth along a defined route so that gun batteries could use her plane to practice identifying her range and direction using their listening equipment and pick her out with their searchlights. It was known as Army Cooperation flying. The work was cold and initially she was unable to find a wireless operator to fly with her. Eventually one man proved ambivalent about flying with a woman pilot and after that she had other willing partners.
In 1943 she was invalided out of the ATA and she took work as a censor. She was entrusted with inspecting press photographs to decide if they revealed secret information.
In 1985 the Imperial War Museum recorded her biography as an oral history.

Legacy

A bus company in Hatfield named its eight buses after the "first eight" of the Tiger Moth pilots in the ATA, including Friedlander. The fifteen surviving women members of the ATA were given a special award in 2008 by the Prime Minister Gordon Brown.