Vera Elsie “Toni” Strodl(b.1918-d.2015) as born in England. She was the daughter of a Danish couple who had moved to the UK to farm although this venture was short lived. In 1929 Vera took her first flight(thought to have been in an Avro 504) the headmaster of her school having loaned her the money to pay for the flight. In 1930 Vera returned to Denmark with her mother and 4 siblings, to live with her recently widowed maternal grandmother.
In April 1934 Vera’s mother allowed her daughter to go back to England to train as a pilot at the Sussex Aero Club. Vera began her classes in 1935. Working as a waitress, a few weeks work enabled her to get 20 minutes of flying time. After 2 years of flying lessons primarily in a de Havilland Moth Vera obtained her pilot’s licence in January 1937.
Her next job was with Phillips & Powis Aircraft Limited based at Woodley Aerodrome, Reading qualifying as an aircraft inspector and then moving to the Gloster Aircraft Company in 1938. With the outbreak of war in 1939 Vera worked for the British subsidiary of an American aircraft manufacturing firm, the Taylor-Young Airplane Company as an aircraft inspector and production test pilot whilst also becoming a member of the Civil Air Guard(C.A.G.) established by the UK Government in July 1938 to encourage and subsidise pilot training as the prospect of another war loomed.
Subsidised tuition for members of participating civilian flying clubs was offered in exchange for an ‘honourable undertaking’ that in an emergency members would serve in the Royal Air Force Volunteer Reserve. Unable to serve in the RAF as a pilot, not even as a flight instructor, because she was a woman Vera joined the Air Transport Auxiliary(A.T.A) in 1941 responsible for the ferrying of new, repaired and damaged aircraft of the RAF and Royal Navy’s Fleet Air Arm between the various factories, maintenance units and bases and in all Vera made over 200 or so ferry flights during the Second World War. After being demobbed in November 1945 Vera joined the Women’s Royal Air Force Volunteer Reserve in 1946 and briefly served as a flight instructor giving flight instruction to members of the Women’s Junior Air Corps.
In 1950/51, Vera joined her friend Mary Ellis at Sandown who had just become Commandant of Sandown Airport and founding manager of the Isle of Wight Flying Club. For two years Vera lived on the Island giving flying instruction from Sandown airfield and in so doing she is thought to have been the first European women to become a chief flight instructor.
In 1953 Vera emigrated to Canada to teach pilots in Canada. Over the next half century she was awarded many honours for her achievements in aviation and continued to fly well into her 70s being honoured in the Canadian Aviation Hall of Fame. At the age of 85 she made a parachute jump strapped to an expert jumper. This quite remarkable women died in January 2015, in Edmonton, Canada and is buried in Edmonton Municipal Cemetery, she was 96 years old.
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