On a bright January morning in 1943, a lone Spitfire was flying over the Cotswolds towards Worcester when the clear sky suddenly filled with cloud. A drop in temperature had condensed the moisture in the air into a giant duvet more than 6,000 ft thick. The Spitfire started climbing, unintentionally as it turned out. Then it levelled off and turned to fly back the way it had come. It was losing height, its pilot peering for any sign of an airfield.

It broke through the cloud at tree-top height, banked sharply to avoid a patch of woodland and made a perfect landing in heavy rain on the grass airstrip of what turned out to be the Navigation and Blind Flying Establishment at RAF Windrush. Out of it climbed the beautiful granddaughter of a South African diamond millionaire.

She was Diana Barnato Walker, then 25, well known in London for her high spirits and late nights at the 400 Club on Leicester Square; also for the Bentleys and Bugattis showered on her by her father, the motor-racing champion Woolf Barnato.

The moment her feet touched the wing of the Spitfire, the adrenalin drained from her system and her knees buckled. An RAF man was sloshing towards her with a rain cape, and Miss Barnato (not yet married) didn’t want him to think anything was wrong. "So I knelt on the wing and scrabbled in the cockpit for my maps," she remembers. At which point, her Walter Raleigh reached up with the cape and murmured, "I say, Miss, you must be good on instruments."

The thing about Miss Barnato, though – the key thing in this instance – was that she had no instruments. She had been hurtling through the muck at the mercy of fate because she flew for a little-remembered organisation that never trained its pilots to "fly blind". She was an ATA girl, a defiant bundle of glamour in the defiantly unglamorous Air Transport Auxiliary, which existed to ferry aircraft to frontline bases and was wound down 60 years ago this month.

The ATA’s drift since then into the margins of history is unfortunate, and unfair. For one thing, a fifth of its pilots were women, and a steelier collection of stereotype-slayers it would be hard to find in all the centuries since Boadicea. For another, flying in the ATA was one of the most dangerous activities available to either sex in the whole war. Its kill rate, according to Eric Viles of the ATA Association, was higher than in RAF Fighter Command.

This was because its pilots flew unarmed, without radios, never mind instruments. If the weather turned bad, they had to double back. If an Me109 blasted out of the sun, they were toast. Of 1,124 pilots who flew for the ATA during the war, nearly one in six was killed.

Some ATA girls still got bored. Ann Wood-Kelly, who took a tramp steamer from Montreal to Liverpool to join up when she was 24, once followed two male pilots up the Avon gorge and under the Clifton suspension bridge in a Spitfire. She later had another go, alone, with drastically reduced clearance because the tide was in. "I’d enjoyed it the first time," she explains. "It was grand fun."

Thus speaks a survivor, six decades on. But it was more a sense of duty than fun that led Amy Johnson, Britain’s most famous woman pilot, to join the ATA in 1940. She had flown solo to Australia and Capetown and wasn’t troubled by the forecast when she took off from Blackpool on January 4, 1941, heading south. But she ran into thick cloud over the Thames estuary and broke the ATA’s cardinal rule of never going "over the top" of filthy weather. She flew above the cloud for nearly three hours looking for a way down, but never found one. At about 3.30pm she levelled the aircraft, cut the engines and baled out. The captain of a navy frigate patrolling the estuary saw her struggling with her parachute and jumped overboard to try to save her. Both drowned.

Half a dozen times, Barnato Walker came within seconds of following Amy Johnson into oblivion. She lived, she says, because of a recurring vision of a little man in a brown leather coat who had appeared beside her as she was about to take off on her first solo flight at Brooklands five years earlier. He put his hands on the edge of the cockpit and his face close to hers. Both were horribly burned. "In those days girls like me didn’t see horrors," she says, "so it was a nasty fright. He looked at me and said, ‘Don’t fly, Miss Barnato. Look what it’s done to me.’ After that I was a very careful pilot."

Still going at 87, she receives guests at her Surrey manse with cut-glass accent and decanter. She’s alarmingly thin. North of Boston, on a private road skirting the Atlantic, Ann Wood-Kelly is still going too, a rangy, Katharine Hepburn figure in John Updikeland. (She has been known to attend weddings in bare feet.)

In the official history of the ATA, published in 1946, E.C. Cheeseman writes in his chapter on women: "Some, being only human, waved their hair or added a touch of lipstick at the end of a flight. Others were of sterner stuff." Barnato Walker may have been one of the hair-wavers. Wood-Kelly was not; nor was her friend Margaret Frost, the daughter of a country parson, who as a 12-year-old dreamt of being taught to fly by Cecil Pashley of Shoreham-by-Sea. Pashley was a First World War test pilot and local hero who, at 4ft 11in, was even shorter than Frost, and Frost is responsible for a cherished ATA legend of the pilotless Hurricane. (She was in it.)

She now lives alone on a windy hill in Wales and still regrets that "the only slow roll I ever did was in my Renault 5". She did perfect the "Frost special", though. "Much more exciting. You get up on top and instead of completing the loop you come down the other way round, diving straight down. Very good battle manoeuvre in World War One, I shouldn’t wonder." It sounds spectacular. "It is quite, actually. Quite sick-making, too."

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