Pilots

Lt. Col. Martha McSally's long journey to become a U.S. Air Force fighter pilot began with a single step: retching. During her first flight in high school she got airsick.

The youngest of five children, the hard-charging McSally was the valedictorian of her high school class, and in 1984 she decided to study aerospace medicine at the Air Force Academy. "While I was there the Air Force took me on some incentive flights in an F-16, and it was fun," she recalls, quick to laugh. "At the time women couldn't fly combat, but part of me said I was going to because they said I couldn't."

In the meantime the Air Force decided to begin teaching women to fly fighters — in noncombat roles — so McSally tried out. The Air Force has minimum height requirements for fighter pilots (5 feet, 4 inches) and McSally measured 5 feet, 3 inches. So the flight surgeons loaded McSally up inside a fighter cockpit to gauge her sitting height, and she passed the cockpit fitting.

But her application came back stamped "denied." This didn't make sense to McSally, so the aerospace physicians ran cockpit tests on her that showed she could perform full rudder deflection as well as hit the brakes. After all, she is a triathlete. Again, the application came back denied. So she hand-carried it to the superintendent of the Air Force Academy and pled her case.

For two years the superintendent appealed to the Air Force; meanwhile McSally pulled out of medical school. "I'd burned all the other bridges," she says. "Coming up on my senior year and the case still wasn't resolved, I felt I was going to end up in some missile silo job." To give herself more time, she applied for and received a two-year graduate scholarship to Harvard.

Finally she got official approval to learn to fly fighters, beginning the second semester of her senior year. So everything ends up happily, right? Well, um.

The night before the Army/Air Force football game, she and a group of cadets volunteered to guard the stadium. A group of drunk civilians razzed the cadets. One guy grabbed McSally's right hand, twisted it, and broke it in three places. After four surgeries spanning one and a half years, the Air Force finally gave her hand a clean bill of health — she could finally begin pilot training.

This was near the end of Desert Storm, when Congress repealed the law preventing women from flying in combat. All's well that ends...um, not yet.

By this time the Air Force was also downsizing, and it needed no new fighter pilots. But it would allow fighter-jocks-to-be to take desk jobs, training them to fly as positions opened up. Or they could take tanker or cargo pilot training. "But if you're assigned to tankers or cargo, that's what you are — there's no changing over," McSally explains.

She flew a desk for a while, until, finally, in 1994 she was chosen as one of the first women for combat fighter training, and she mastered the A-10 Warthog, a close air support machine built like an armored truck. As soon as she qualified she was deployed flying patrols over Iraq's no-fly zone.

McSally, promoted to lieutenant colonel four years before her peers, became the first American woman to fly in combat. Her combat assignment opened the floodgates: Today nearly three dozen women fly Air Force fighters, and it's almost common to see American women flying F-18s off carrier decks.

Later tours sent her to Saudi Arabia and to lead the rescue unit in Afghanistan, which rescued two chopper crews and plucked the crew of a stricken B-1 from the Indian Ocean.