Women wanted to fly jets in combat. Breaking that barrier would be the fight of their lives.
In the early 1990s, few corners of the military were as misogynistic as the world of fighter pilots. This is the story of the women Navy officers who overcame that culture to fly the formidable F-14.
5BB65E1E-C323-4DFF-B2EC-1A6EEA376694.jpeg
The F-14 Tomcat was a Rorschach test of a fighter jet. Some considered it an unwieldy monster. Others said it commanded grudging respect. Still others compared the 25-ton jet to an elephant — huge, powerful, and stubborn. Whatever you called it, the F-14 was as storied as it was formidable. It reigned for years as the workhorse among US Navy air combat machines.
For Lt. Kara Hultgreen, the F-14 started out as a consolation prize. The 29-year-old hotshot had wanted to fly an F/A-18 Hornet, the sharpest and newest member of the Navy’s fleet. But after a few months of training, the F-14 won Hultgreen’s heart. She came to consider it a remarkable plane, complicated and humbling.
Hultgreen lived in Solana Beach, California, a half-hour north of Miramar Naval air base, where she was headed the morning of October 25, 1994. She got up early that day. She debated what to wear out the door — khakis or her flight suit. Wearing flight suits through the gate was frowned upon. But since she’d have to change clothes right away, she decided to blow off the rule and go with the suit.
She was excited about the detachment. The night before, she’d taken her gear to her stateroom aboard the aircraft carrier USS Abraham Lincoln, including a beloved down comforter grown scruffy and clumped over the years. She liked to wind herself in it when she slept. “I’m going to the boat next week until 9 Nov. Should be fun,” she wrote in a letter to her father. “I’m also in November issue of McCall’s magazine.”
Hultgreen wasn’t the first woman to fly a Tomcat, but she was the first to fly one operationally, tactically, and to land it on the flight deck of an aircraft carrier. And she was the first woman in the US Navy to qualify as a combat-rated jet pilot.
2DA30D87-C361-4A4B-9E7F-75BEBA11D920.jpeg
327332A6-1587-440A-B35A-47B47D912151.jpeg
82E9B12D-4BEC-4BE7-8C60-D74EA87D2172.jpeg
5F56D93C-21D1-4959-8293-A2E01DE61F21.jpeg
https://www.vox.com/features/2317944...n-tailhook-f14