These Groundbreaking Pilots Made History 30 Years Ago as the First American Women to Fly Combat Missions

In two seconds, the massive F/A-18C Hornet went from sitting still to roaring past 160 miles per hour as it launched off the deck of the USS Dwight D. Eisenhower (CVN-69). It was two years into Operation Southern Watch—the U.S.-led effort to enforce no-fly and no-drive zones in Iraq during the aftermath of the 1991 Persian Gulf War. During that time, hundreds of American aircraft had been regularly flying in that dangerous environment, but one of the Hornets that launched on November 15, 1994, was different: a woman was at the controls.

U.S. Navy Lieutenant Kimberly “Face” Dyson became the first American woman to officially fly a combat mission that day. “We were ready to do anything,” Dyson recalled when interviewed almost thirty years later. “It was a little nerve-racking. But in the end, it turned out to be a normal flight, very much the same as we had done in practice.”

Dyson was not alone. She served with fellow F/A-18 pilots Lieutenant Sharon “Pinto” Deegan (Cummings at the time) and Lieutenant Junior Grade Joy “Trigger” Dean (Adams at the time), E-2C Hawkeye pilot Lieutenant Lisa “KP” Kirkpatrick, and Sikorsky SH-3 helicopter pilot Lieutenant Lynne Fowler. They all flew combat missions on that same cruise from the Eisenhower, the first U.S. aircraft carrier to deploy with a gender-integrated crew. They continued flying combat missions into 1995 as part of Operation Deny Flight in Bosnia and Herzegovina.

None of these women intended to achieve such milestones. “I didn’t feel any weight of history,” Dean noted. “We wanted to put our heads down. We wanted to work. We wanted to do the mission.” Like many military pilots before them, most of these women had joined out of a love of flying, attracted to the challenge of carrier aviation. Dean’s father was in the Air Force, and she saw the Navy as her chance to fly: “The Navy, they were letting women fly jets. Not deploying, obviously, but letting them fly aggressors.” Deegan’s motivation was simple but powerful: “I just wanted to fly jets.” Kirkpatrick recalled: “I just wanted a tailhook, that was all I wanted. Flying in naval aviation off the ship is probably the most challenging thing you can do.”

When Dyson, Dean, Deegan, and Kirkpatrick had joined the Navy, the U.S. Department of Defense still held to the “combat exclusion law,” a policy that banned women from flying combat missions. After years of activism both internal and external to the military, as well as several public events that brought the issue of gender discrimination to a public debate, the law was repealed in 1991. In the Spring of 1993, all the military services began assigning women to combat aviation roles.

Reactions to the arrival of women in combat aviation roles was mixed. Dyson was the first to arrive on the Eisenhower, and she recalled her commanding officer’s greeting: “Look, I didn’t ask for you. I didn’t want you, but I’m stuck with you. So don’t [mess] up.” Not everyone felt this way—Dyson said that about half of her male shipmates had no problem with women crew members.

What really normalized the presence of women was the test of carrier flight operations. Gender mattered less than being a good pilot. “If you were a good stick, you were a good stick,” Dyson said, “and they couldn’t take that away from you.” “We became a pretty cohesive unit,” Kirkpatrick added. “The Eisenhower by the end was just used to women on board—we figured it out. There were problems, yes, there were issues. But at some point, it just wasn’t a thing.”

Flying in high-threat areas over Iraq and Bosnia, these women took on the same risks—with the same enthusiasm—as any other fighter pilot in combat. Deegan wrote a letter home, describing her first combat mission, the day after Dyson’s: “I was in a strike package that flew right over an active SAM (surface-to-air missile) site; directly into the heart of its envelope. It’s almost as if we were trying to pick a fight.” Dyson recalled that the missions in Bosnia were more dangerous: “Those were the ones where they were actually shooting at us.” She flew a particularly dangerous mission in which “I was a decoy for a SAM site.” This required her to fly over a SAM launch site to activate its tracking radar so that EA-6B Prowlers flying behind her could attack the site with anti-radiation missiles. “I wasn’t thrilled with that one,” she said. Dean remembered how she felt just before that campaign began: “It’s going to be my time—I’m going to get to do something.” Kirkpatrick faced a difficult situation flying the Hawkeye: “We couldn’t eject in the E-2,” says Kirkpatrick. “If we were hit by a missile, we were never getting out of that airplane.” Despite the dangers, Deegan recalled that the missions during Deny Flight “were a lot more fun.”

These women proved that being a good combat pilot has nothing to do with one’s gender. Their efforts set the foundation for many women that have come after them in the years since. More than anything, these women were proud that the presence of women aircrews soon became normal and unremarkable. They were pilots—not regarded as different because they were women. As Dean put it: “I wanted to be judged on my merit, and if I was judged on my merit, then we’d be good to go. And we were.”

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Mike Hankins | READ MORE

curator of U.S. Air Force, Navy, and Marine Corps post-World War II aviation at the National Air and Space Museum