The handful of women survivors who flew Spitfires as part of the Air Transport Auxiliary (ATA) during the Second World War are now expected to be honoured with a special badge. Without their flying skills and amazing courage in delivering aircraft to the RAF bases for their male counterparts, the Battle of Britain would - quite literally - never have got off the ground.

In total, the ATA delivered 308,567 aircraft, including 57,286 Spitfires, 29,401 Hurricanes, 9,805 Lancasters and 7,039 Barracudas. In mid-1942, when British aircraft production reached its peak, the ATA was moving more planes each day than British Airways did on a typical day in 2006. The women were expected to fly what they were given - sometimes a couple of different types in one day - and had to rely on hastily reading notes before takeoff and landing. Even worse, they had no instrument training - a deliberate decision by officials - which meant of course, that some pilots died.

Currently there are some fifteen or sixteen women still surviving - now in their eighties and nineties - and they first came to the attention of Nigel Griffiths, Labour MP for Edinburgh South after he read "Spitfire Women of World War II" by the Times journalist Giles Whittell. Griffiths, who referred to the women as 'a unique sisterhood of flying addicts who came to England from five continents'  said: “These are forgotten people and they deserve an honour.”

Margaret Frost, now 87 and living in mid-Wales, hated heights - yet spent three years flying the aircraft. She welcomed the suggestion of a badge for her and her colleagues: “I was 23 when I joined the ATA. I was 5ft 2¾ when the minimum height requirement was 5ft 4in, but I got through. You had to fly the Spitfires without any radio system, and the only way you knew you could land at an airbase was when someone stood on the runway with a green light rather than a red light.

“I always hated heights but it was different being enclosed in the Spitfire - it was lovely. I never flew higher than 2,000ft, and have so many memories of that time, but reminiscing is tiring. I was lucky because the weather was kind to me, but there were others - fifteen of them - who lost their lives flying in bad weather.”

The most famous female  ATA member was Amy Johnson, the first woman to fly solo from Britain to Australia in 1930, a journey of 11,000 miles. She joined the ATA in 1940 and was promoted to First Officer. In January 1941, while flying an Airspeed Oxford from Blackpool to RAF Kidlington in Oxfordshire, she was caught in poor weather and eventually the aircraft’s two tanks ran out of fuel.

She clambered out on to the fuselage with her parachute and jumped, but landed in the Thames Estuary and drowned. A rescue attempt was made but her body was never recovered.

In today's society, of course, we ask the obvious question - why were such superb pilots not flying in combat, instead of half-trained young men sent up to die? Giles Whittell put that question to the formidable Lettice Curtis, now aged 90. She rolled her eyes and responded: “There was no question of it, and it was not a question you asked. It just never came up.” But he then asked a senior male air force officer if they could have, and the officer responds that he’d no doubt at all Curtis would have made a good combat pilot.

Nigel Griffiths, whose father flew Mosquito fighter bombers in the war, has been given encouraging indications that the Prime Minister is backing his campaign for the women to be honoured. It comes in line with with the announcement last year that the Land Girls of the Second World War were to receive a special badge.