High-stress performance: male and female combat pilots in the cockpit

https://www.rebellionresearch.com/female-vs-male-pilots-in-ww2

Female Vs Male Pilots In WW2 This night’s bombing mission of the 46th Guards Regiment was horrific.  It was a nightmare for the two surviving crews flying Soviet built Po-2s. They returned to land on a grass field lit only by kerosene lanterns.  Thirty minutes earlier, six of the biplanes, each laden with 200 kilograms of bombs, struggled up and into the warm air of a July night.

The wooden airframe and cloth-covered Polikarpov biplane. Looked more like a relic of the First World  War than a modern attack aircraft. In addition, she only had a top speed of barely ninety miles per hour. 

These planes-some unarmed and some fitted only with a single 7.62 mm rear machine gun. Fired by the plane’s navigator, flew into combat. 

Instead of veteran Soviet airmen at the controls. Young girls-eighteen, nineteen, and twenty years of age were flying night bombing missions to repel the Nazi invaders.  Now, only half an hour later, just two of the Po-2s. Both showing extensive damage, returned to a grassy meadow, used as a landing field.  The others fell burning from the night sky. Victims of a new tactic by the Nazis of employing night fighters against the slow-flying biplanes.

The two Po-2s finally rolled to a stop.  At the controls were Larissa Razanova and her navigator and friend, Nadia Studilina. Along with nineteen-year-old Natalia Meklin in the cockpit of the second fragile bomber. The other four aircraft, along with eight young women, had fallen from the skies over the Kuban River. Carrying their friends to their deaths. Yet, as Larissa would report, both she and Nadia maneuvered to outfly the Messerschmitt fighters and their pilots. Striking and destroying their target.