14 A month had passed since the wedding, and on October 26, 1944, Gertrude sat in the cockpit of the new P-51D at Mines Field in Los Angeles as a North American Aviation repairman tinkered with the canopy glide. The repairs would mean a late departure. Other WASPs in her P-51 group had already lifted off and were zooming east.
Gertrude Tompkins was anxious to be in the air.
She looked out at the gauzy orange sun that peered through the haze over the bay. Since now her takeoff was not going to happen until after 3:18 PM, she had been ordered to fly only as far as the air force base in Palm Springs, roughly 100 miles away. She would RON there. The next day she would fly another five hours to Newark, adding to her existing flying time of 350.05 hours.
The mechanic completed his work on the cockpit. Gertrude cranked the handle to bring the Plexiglas canopy forward. Apparently she was satisfied.
“Tower, this is Mustang 669. Request clearance for takeoff.”
These were the last words she was ever heard to speak.
She taxied toward the south runway, weaving an S as she’d been taught. She braked. She turned the ship to face into the nearly imperceptible breeze off the ocean. After taking off and looping around, she would soon have the wind behind her as she raced east.
The weather was good, they had told her in the briefing—68 degrees. There was a marine layer this day over Santa Monica Bay. A marine layer is warm air that is cooled by the temperature of the sea, forming a haze. She would climb out of it in seconds. The tower gave her a time check. It was 3:42 PM when Gertrude began rolling, the ringing thunder of the powerful Mustang pulling her toward the misty, orange sun.
It was four days before anyone noticed that Gertrude Tompkins was missing. At Love Field, in Dallas, her base of record, somebody saw she had not filed the required remain-overnight telegram from October 26. With 80 of its women pilots coming and going across the country every day, the Fifth Ferry Group headquarters in Dallas was hard-pressed to keep track of all of them.
A call was placed to the Long Beach WASP coordinating center. Was Gertrude Tompkins still there?
No.
The official was told to call the control tower at Mines Field, where she’d taken off, and see what information they had. There was confusion over the number of the plane she flew. The records said she was in number 662, not 669.
Number 662? Mustang 662 had been delivered, someone noted, but it had been flown by WASP Dorothy Hopkins, not by Gertrude Tompkins.
What about tower clearance? Paperwork problems, came the response. Check Palm Springs and Arizona. Wasn’t she supposed to make it to Albuquerque?
She was not in any of the other possible locations.
The war had created an enormous number of flights, and every day was chaotic with aircraft coming and going at what would become Los Angeles International Airport. The common practice for WASPs at the time was to file a flight plan covering all of the day’s pilots ferrying P-51s from Mines Field. There were no individual flight plans, so it was impossible to know who left at what time. (One of the changes in procedure after Gertrude’s disappearance was that individual flight plans would be filed for each pilot.)
On October 30, 1944, Gertrude Tompkins was declared missing. Clerical oversights and errors resulted in a late start in looking for her. The next morning a search began.
Gertrude Tompkins, 1944. Courtesy WASP Archive, Texas Woman’s University Libraries