Jackie Moggridge was 5'1" and branded a 'schoolgirl' when she joined the Air Transport Auxiliary in the early 1940s. By the end of the war, she had grown another two inches - a help, in a man-sized cockpit, but still not enough to stop her needing to use a stack of logbooks as a makeshift booster seat so she could reach the controls. Now in her autumn years, Jackie remembers the arrangement with a mischievous smile: "no problem except I couldn't strap myself in, so I just had to hope I didn't crash".

By the late summer of 1940, with thousands of the Luftwaffe's planes attacking every day, the life expectancy of a British Spitfire pilot was just six weeks and the authorities saw themselves forced to make an unappealing decision. Like their US counterparts, newly recruited female pilots were never going to be sent to war. "The menace is the woman who thinks that she ought to be flying a high-speed bomber when she really has not the intelligence to scrub the floor of a hospital properly", spat the press with derision. On the other side of the pond, anxious men reassured themselves that the women were 'still just girls underneath'. "They only wanted to look at the feminine side of us, they wanted to make us look stupid", remembers former US Women's Airforce Service Pilot, Alma Jeschien. But the national disregard for the efforts of these trailblazing women went far deeper than just sexist cartoons in the papers. The family of a WASP killed in action had to come and collect her body themselves - and when they couldn't afford it, the WASPs had to raise the money to send her body home.

Women with the drive and courage to get behind the controls of a plane fared better in the Soviet Union, which had more female pilots than the rest of the world put together. But this didn't stop them having to prove their worth, or their ability to do a 'man's' job. Unfortunately, Stalin forced them out of the military and civilian air force when the war was over, while the USA discharged its female fliers without so much as a bus ride home. With unique archive footage and present-day interviews with the pilots themselves, this saddening but inspiring documentary offers a unique insight into the experiences of the thousands of courageous women who've been written out of the history books.