Air Force Seeks More Female Pilots, Aims to Retain, Promote Women and Minorities

Suddenly, the AF *needs* female pilots. Non-white pilots are less the AF's concern perhaps b/c the AF will happily train anyone as a pilot who is willing to do it and qualify for doing so.

There's the rub. First, you have to want to. Before deciding to go for it, most pilot candidates set their sites (as it were) on their post-AF career opportunities, such as becoming a commercial jet pilot. So in order to get gov't-sponsored training and experience, they seek to become jet pilots. So they start asking questions and doing research. Soon they discover certain realities around being a jet pilot or air crew member. First, if one becomes a fighter pilot, he would be sacrificing years off his life and increasing his chances of getting dementia every time he pulls Gs. The speeds that today's fighters fly at induce unconsciousness during sudden breaks that force blood to move too quickly from the brain or into the brain. A modern fighter pilot's flight suit is a complex apparatus that constantly monitors the pilot's vitals and uses compressed air and balloons inside the suit to forcibly redirect the pilot's blood-flow to force him back to consciousness after he passes out on a sharp turn -- the kind needed during a dog-fight or when evading S2A missiles. OK, not so bad. But then there are the microscopic tears on the brain's surface that create superficial bleeding into the cranium each time that happens, duplicating to a degree the organic symptoms of such things as MS. And then of course there's the pinholes that form in the eardrums when a pilot in a non-pressurized cabin hits a certain height, dulling one's hearing permanently each time. Fighter cockpits as well as cargo plane cockpits are not always pressurized, and even when they are, the pressurization is not always effective (esp. on cargo planes).

Unlike civilian req'ts, the AF is subject only to its own needs. If a commander tells a pilot to fly a plane even if the cockpit is unpressurized and unheated b/c there's no time or spare parts to fix it, too bad. You have to fly it.

Before Google, aspiring AF pilots knew only what they saw in the movies and on TV. These facts were not easily uncovered. Now, they are. So is it any surprise the AF and USN (as well as other branches) are low on pilots? Not to me, it isn't.

So now, the appeal becomes this: You're female, and we've finally come to our senses and decided you can and should become pilots. Same for under-represented ethnic groups (i.e., anyone who isn't white). So now, you'll be as special, sexy, and powerful as all these white male pilots have always been! THIS is *real* progress!

Well, maybe, in a sense. Now non-male, non-whites can, like all those white guys past and present, know the joy of the foregoing and its consequences, not to mention the fun, perhaps, of being rendered unconscious while trying desperately to shake a pursuing fighter's mounted gun fire or a destroyer's anti-aircraft missile only to be pulled back from unconsciousness in just enough time to realize you have to do it again to keep from getting killed in a fiery explosion, all while trying to comply with orders being blared at you over radio and figure out a counterattack strategy that will both get the heat off you and allow you to fulfill your orders.

When Winston Churchill famously said "Never was so much owed by so many to so few," he was referring to the RAF. The casualty rate in air crews was about 50% during the Battle of Britain, and it was fought almost entirely in the air. Following that, the air war continued with air crew casualties ranging between 20 and 80% during the effort to gain air supremacy over Germany. For US aircrews alone, during US involvement in the war, we lost on average 220 airmen of all crew positions per *day*. Pilots and air crewman got into their planes daily knowing the chances of coming back each time were very slim and got worse by the day. But they went anyway.

Getting into a modern military plane, a fighter or not, is an inherently risky proposition. The walk-away factor is very low. And this is so even in peacetime, even when up against technically or militarily inferior enemies. Think carefully before making this decision, ladies -- and gentlemen.