![]() There are many accounts of female pilot heroics in the Iraq and Afghanistan wars. “My hope is to be as good as the best of the best that I’ve had. Joyner told reporters, according to The Virginian-Pilot newspaper. The wing commands are perhaps preludes to achieving flag rank and even more prestigious commands. Sara Joyner, an F-18 Hornet pilot, as its first female aircraft carrier air wing commander. ![]() Jeannie Leavitt, an F-15E Strike Eagle pilot, won the competition to be the service’s first female fighter wing commander. Last year, the Air Force announced that Col. McSally was the first to fly a fighter in combat and the service’s first woman squadron commander. Women aviators have claimed a series of “firsts.”Ĭol. Valerie Cappelaere Delaney, 26, died when the EA-6B Prowler she was piloting crashed into a field during training near Naval Air Station Whidbey Island, Wash. All five crew members on the nighttime training mission, died. Sara Knutson, a pilot whose UH-60 Black Hawk helicopter crashed March 11 in Kandahar, Afghanistan. On Monday, a funeral Mass was held in Sykesville, Md., for Army Capt. ![]() While the breakthrough is 20 years old, the public occasionally is reminded of these trailblazers when a female aviator achieves a first, or one makes the ultimate sacrifice. “The more we can get our recruiting message out to make sure young girls realize that there is anything they can do now when they serve, they can go for it, then that will probably certainly help raise those numbers.” McSally offered an assessment of why women account for 2 percent of the Air Force’s combat pilots but 19 percent of that service’s 64,000-strong officer corps. When asked why so few female officers have become combat pilots, representatives of the armed services and Pentagon top brass declined to comment.Ĭol. The Army has 513 female helicopter pilots, but the service could not provide a breakdown of support and combat pilots. Women account for less than 1 percent of the Marine Corps’ fixed-wing pilots and about 4 percent of Navy F-18 Hornet and radar-jamming jet pilots. Numbering 85, female pilots make up 2 percent of the Air Force’s 3,714 fighter and bomber jocks at the rank of lieutenant colonel and below. Women constitute a distinct minority among air combat pilots, according to statistics provided by the armed services to The Times. Subsequently in the exercise, he was ‘shot down’ by a young female lieutenant who was in my group.” Deptula recalled: “During a major air combat training exercise, one of the opposing force flight leaders was a lieutenant colonel squadron commander who was very vocal that he did not like the idea of women fighter pilots. “They are based on performance, pure and simple.” David Deptula, a fighter pilot by training, told The Times. “Combat skills are blind to rank, gender, race, color or creed,” retired Air Force Lt. The change in policy allowing men and women to fly in the same combat wings endured some turbulence over allegations of favoritism but now is a mostly seamless part of training and war. It will be 20 years ago on April 28 that then-Defense Secretary Les Aspin first authorized female combat pilots. “They just sort of said, ‘I hope this works out for you.’” They didn’t do that when they threw us into fighters,” she told The Washington Times. “It seems like they went to an extraordinary amount of effort to make sure the climate was created. ![]() Gates prepared the entire force, unit by unit, in 2011 for openly gay service members. McSally says there are lessons from her experience and from the way then-Defense Secretary Robert M. ![]()
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