To join the Air Transport Auxiliary (ATA), women pilots needed a minimum of 500 hours' solo flying, twice that of a man.

After sufficiently increasing her hours, in early 1942 Dunlop and her sister Joan travelled across the Atlantic Ocean on a neutral Argentine-registered ship.

[1] She was forced into occasional emergency landings, once after the cockpit canopy of her Spitfire blew off after takeoff and another occasion put down in a field after the engine of her Fairchild Argus failed in the air.

The shot featured on the front page of Picture Post magazine in 1944, proving women could be fearless as well as glamorous, and integral to the war effort.

[1] In 1955, she married retired Romanian diplomat Serban (Şerban) Victor Popp after meeting him at a British Embassy function in Buenos Aires.