The Air Force's Black Pilot State of the Union

This is an excerpt from the chapter entitled "A Comparison of "Firsts":

“Baja, Combo, Spyce, Shooter, Shock: They’re all call signs of mission-qualified fighter and bomber pilots, and the only unusual thing about them is that these monikers of warrior-group bonding belong to women.

April 2003 will mark 10 years since the Air Force changed its policy to permit women to take up combat assignments as fighter and bomber pilots. Since then, dozens of female officers have completed rigorous training to become proficient in flying fighters and bombers…

Lifting the Ban

Congress removed the legal ban on women in combat aircraft by passing Public Law 102-190 in December 1991. But Department of Defense policy still prohibited women from taking up combat aircraft assignments. Secretary of Defense Les Aspin lifted the policy ban on April 28, 1993.

The Air Force had already been contemplating how to respond, and nothing brought the matter to a head more clearly than the case of a young lieutenant named Jeannie M. Flynn. Flynn was commissioned through ROTC and received a master’s degree in aerospace engineering before heading off to pilot training. Flynn had graduated first in her Undergraduate Pilot Training class in 1992. Air Force rules called for newly minted pilots to select their weapon system based on merit and cockpit availability. The early 1990s were the days of banked pilots and dwindling choices for assignments. Typical pilot training classes competed for one or two fighter seats. Flynn earned the right to choose first, and she selected the plum: an F-15E assignment.

With the policy restriction still in place, the Air Force could not comply and sent Flynn to be a First Assignment Instructor Pilot, teaching students to fly the T-38. Meanwhile, Flynn’s case wound its way through the bureaucracy, ultimately to be reviewed by Air Force Secretary Donald B. Rice, who found his hands tied by Pentagon policy.

Flynn’s case pointed out the discrepancy between the exclusion policy and the Air Force’s standards. Fighter pilots are trained, not born. Flynn made the grade by objective standards but found her options limited by a policy suggesting women would get in over their heads.

Aspin’s 1993 decision came just in time for Flynn. As a highly skilled young female pilot, Flynn’s next option after the FAIP assignment most likely would have been to KC-10s, the cream of the crop of flying assignments outside the fighter and bomber communities. Tanker and airlift crews welcomed an earlier generation of women such as Col. Pamela A. Melroy, commissioned in 1983, who flew KC-10s in Desert Storm and then moved on to Air Force Test Pilot School and from there to NASA, where she is an astronaut with two shuttle missions under her belt.

The Air Force looked back over the records of two years’ worth of Undergraduate Pilot Training classes to find women whose class rankings would have qualified them to select a fighter or bomber at the time they graduated. The hunt also factored in how many fighter and bomber slots were available to each class, sometimes a number as low as one. Based on these criteria, the Air Force identified three pilots who would have been sent to fighters or bombers had the ban not been still in place. These included Flynn and then-Capt. Martha McSally. By the end of 1993, seven women were in training to fly fighters.

Women Pilots in Combat

Flynn went to four weeks of fighter lead-in training in T-38s and on to the schoolhouse for F-15E training, then at Luke AFB, Ariz. In February 1994, Air Force Chief of Staff Gen. Merrill A. McPeak introduced Flynn to the press as the Air Force’s first mission-qualified female fighter pilot.

“She didn’t ask for anything from anybody,” said McPeak. “Nobody gave her anything, and she went right through that course just like everybody else.

Everybody in the squadron had very high respect for her. And in her opinion, the F-15E is the world’s greatest airplane.”

Flynn and the F-15E were indeed a good match. She went on to log more than 2,000 hours in the F-15E by the end of 2002, including 200 hours of combat time in Operation Allied Force. She was the first female fighter pilot to graduate from the USAF Weapons School at Nellis AFB, Nev., and is currently assigned as an F-15E instructor at the school–once again, the first woman to hold that post.

By 1994 the Air Force had seven female fighter pilots–including Flynn–and two bomber pilots.

In 1995, McSally became the first Air Force female pilot to fly a combat aircraft into enemy territory–the no-fly zone mission over Iraq. McSally was an athletic Air Force Academy graduate who’d had to get a waiver to fly because at five feet three inches she was one inch under the regulation height. She made Air Force history flying the A-10.

While the Air Force worked women into the fighter and bomber squadrons with few hiccups, the numbers of women in combat cockpits did not grow fast. In 1998, there were still only eight bomber pilots and 25 fighter pilots, a tiny fraction of the overall force. But the numbers were on the rise. Fueled by accessions from the Air Force Academy, a new group of women who’d never experienced the combat exclusion ban were making it through Undergraduate Pilot Training with high marks.

Three Air Force female combat pilots agreed–a little reluctantly–to be interviewed for this story. The big news? They love flying. They love the Air Force. They talk just like the guys.

An F-15C Pilot

‘Since I went to the academy, I know a lot of female fighter pilots,’ said 1997 graduate Capt. Samantha A. ‘Combo’ Weeks, who is now an F-15C pilot with more than 700 hours at the 94th Fighter Squadron at Langley AFB, Va. Weeks had two things in common with legions of fighter pilots before her. She came from a military family, and her determination to fly sprouted early.”

“My father was a master sergeant in the Air Force, so I grew up in it,” Weeks explained in a recent interview. “We were stationed in [RAF] Lakenheath [UK]. When I was about five years old, and we were flying back from England on a KC-135, we refueled F-15s over the Atlantic. I decided I had to do that.”

There is so much to unpack from this article that I underlined each point so as not to miss any of the key things that differentiate how the first white women experienced fighter pilot training and how black women experienced it. First, let’s look at the most obvious and consequential difference, the first white women fighter pilots went through training as a group. The article initially refers to them as part of a “warrior-group bonding” belonging “to women.” In three separate quotes it describes this group of seven women going through fighter pilot training together: “By the end of 1993, seven women were in training to fly fighters,” “By 1994 the Air Force had seven female fighter pilots,” “a new group of women who’d never experienced the combat exclusion ban were making it through Undergraduate Pilot Training with high marks.”

The article doesn’t conclude that placing the women together contributed to their success, but it implies it through words like “group bonding” “making it through Undergraduate Pilot Training with high marks.” One of the implied words in making through UPT is “together.” They made it through together with high marks—seven started, and seven finished. Moreover, this was no random group of women. They picked the women who had the highest marks in undergraduate flight training and clustered them together. I will call it a supercluster.

In the previous chapter on clustering, I shared that the Air Force has successfully experimented with the clustering of minorities since the 1960s, with the same type of success that was achieved with these women. I also shared that it has refused to make clustering the permanent way that it trains minorities. Yet the very first time that the Air Force sought to train white women fighter pilots, it created a supercluster of the best women pilot training students, consciously or unconsciously posturing them for success.

In the article, Gen. McPeak says of Maj. Gen. Leavitt: “She didn’t ask for anything from anybody…Nobody gave her anything, and she went right through that course just like everybody else.” But that’s deceptive. She didn’t have to ask for a support group of women to go through pilot training with; the Air Force gave it to her. It put her in a supercluster of the highest-rated white female pilot training students from the past two years.