The Army Air Forces last week tapped the one group of experienced pilots that had not yet heard the come-hitcher of the armed services. To ferry aircraft from factory to airdrome, release uniformed men for combat service, it invited the 500 or 600 women with commercial pilot licenses to give it a lift, sat back to await a rush of ladybirds.

Name of the new service is the Women's Auxiliary Ferrying Squadron. Not yet ready to put skirted airmen into its uniform, the Air Forces will hire its new ferry service pilots as Civil Service employees (at $3,000 a year). As boss of the new squadron the Air Forces picked photogenic, 28-year-old Mrs. Nancy Harkness Love, flying wife of a lieutenant colonel in the Air Transport Command, set her up in business at headquarters at Wilmington, Del.

There Vassar-trained Nancy Love, who has sold airplanes, helped her husband operate a flying school, flown the length and breadth of the U.S., will shortly begin training her first recruits. She looks forward to the day when the WAFS will become a uniformed part of the armed forces, like their British opposite number, Air Transport Auxiliaries.