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Wall of Honor Level:
Air and Space Friend

Honored by:
Ms. Helen Gibbons-Hillstrom

Ginny Webb Earnshaw (Mary Virginia Gibbons) learned to fly at Pittsburgh Butler Airport, Butler, PA. in the Civil Pilot Training program while she was a student at Duquesne University. She went on to accumulate 3,000 hours flying time, and a commercial instructor's and Federal Aviation Agency (FAA ) flight examiner's rating. She was chief pilot at the Pittsburgh Seaplane Base, located at the foot of the Sixth Street Bridge on the Allegheny River and later on the Ohio River in downtown Pittsburgh, PA.

In 1944 Gibbons was in Class 44-W-8 of the Women's Airforce Service Pilot (WASP) program in Sweetwater, Texas, where the U.S. Army Air Force trained more than 1,000 women pilots to fly military fighters, bombers and trainers to help the U.S. war effort. The 44-W-8 class was the next to last to graduate before the program was shut down as male pilots returned from overseas and flooded Congress with complaints they should be given the U.S. service pilot assignments.

After World War II Gibbons returned to working as a civilian flight instructor. Eventually she moved to Washington, DC and became a writer and editor for aviation magazines and local newspapers. In the 1970s she was assistant managing editor of a noise control newsletter for the Bureau of National Affairs in Washington, DC. For three years she was a feature writer for The Air Line Pilot, the magazine of the Air Line Pilots Association. For a number of years she was the local government reporter for the Gazette Newspapers and The Montgomery County Sentinel in Rockville, MD.

Gibbons and Jean Ross Howard of Aircraft Industries Association flew a Cessna 140 sponsored by American Mercury Insurance Co. in the I955 Women's International Air Race from Washington, D.C. to Havana, Cuba.

Flying was a family interest. Her brother, Captain J. E. Gibbons, was an army pilot with the USAF, and brother LTjg John F. Gibbons, USNR, was a navy pilot.