An Extraordinary Tribute Flight to the Hero of an Extraordinary Life

Rosemary Mariner was 65 years old when she died on January 24, 2019 in Knoxville, Tennessee. She had lost a five-year battle with cancer. Upon her death, the New York Times, the powerful US media outlet, published an article about her life and struggle.

Rosemary Mariner was a Groundbreaking Navy Pilot and Commander

Rosemary Mariner was the first female combat pilot in the US Naval Air Force (NAVAIR), the first female A-4 Skyhawk pilot, the first female A-7E Corsair pilot, and the first female commander of a naval aviation fighter squadron. 

Rosemary Mariner broke down barriers and successfully fought for a congressional provision (legal decision) that lifted the ban on women serving in combat, setting an example with her love of duty and her life for the elimination of discrimination between men and women in the US Armed Forces. 

When she joined the US Navy in 1973, she was a licensed airline pilot and engineer and had graduated from Purdue University at the age of 19 with a bachelor's degree in aviation technology, the first woman to enroll in a newly created aviation program. She had also attended the university's flight school and earned both her airline aircraft engineer and airline aircraft pilot certificates (ATPL). This was a dizzying example of perseverance, struggle and achievement for a young person and a woman (as it was understood at the time).

Ever since she was a child watching the Navy fighter jets taking off from Miramar Naval Air Station in San Diego, she had been fascinated by flight, especially jet fighter flight.

In the early 1970s, most women in the US NAVY were assigned to hospital duties or clerical work. But times were about to change.

After graduating from naval midshipman school in 1973, Lieutenant Mariner was selected for the US Navy's first flight training program for women; she was one of six graduates to wear her flight rating in 1974. The following year, she became the first female pilot in the Navy to fly the A-4 Skyhawk, a single-seat jet fighter.

In 1976, she transitioned to the A-7E Corsair II, making her the first woman to fly a front-line tactical attack aircraft.

After several assignments, in July 1990 she was named commander of a Naval Tactical Electronic Warfare Squadron at Naval Air Station Point Mugu in Southern California. The squadron, a 300-member unit of which about 30 percent were women, flew aircraft that simulated Soviet and other enemy jet fighters. The squadron's core inventory included aircraft and missiles, some of them genuinely foreign, used for training US carrier squadrons. Since women were still not allowed to fly combat missions, they could use their flying and combat skills in such exercises.

The NAVY would face a major embarrassment in the 90s. In September 1991, members of the Tailhook Association, a group of retired and active duty Naval aviators attending a Navy-sanctioned convention in Las Vegas, harassed female Navy personnel. When what became known as the Tailhook scandal came to light, Colonel Mariner put it in a broad context.

If you can't share equal risks and dangers in challenging duty, then you are not equal.

Referring to women barred from combat, he told the PBS program "The MacNeil/Lehrer NewsHour" that his nearly 20-plus years in the Navy taught him this: "If you can't share equal risks and dangers in a challenging mission, then you're not equal."

So Mariner believed in and constantly emphasized the need for me to aspire to the mission.

"And if the organization you belong to is anti-discriminatory," he added, "then it's not easy for perverts to decide that I can harass you and get away with it." If you want to stop discrimination, if you want to stop harassment, first you have to change the attitude and perception of the organization you belong to towards women soldiers, and then you have to fight for it. If you want to be treated as an equal, you will also be willing to endure the difficult tasks and/or mission challenges of those who do not treat you equally.

Mariner was the leader of the Women Military Aviators organization. In 1992, she worked with members of Congress and a Defense Department advisory board to overturn laws and regulations that kept women out of combat.

In April 1993, the US Congress lifted restrictions on women pilots flying combat/combat missions. Until then, female pilots in the Navy, Army and Air Force were limited to training and other non-combat duties. This restriction included not only female pilots, but also female soldiers in other classes (occupations).

"When Colonel Mariner retired from the Navy in 1997, she became one of the nation's leading advocates for equal opportunity in the armed forces," Deborah G. Douglas wrote in her book "American Women and Flight from 1940 to the present" (2005).

Mariner's last military assignment was as the Chief of Staff's Professor of Military Studies at the National War College. After twenty-four years of military service, he retired as a veteran of seventeen aircraft carrier deployments with more than 3,500 military flight hours in fifteen different Navy aircraft.

Rosemary Ann Bryant was born on April 2, 1953 in Harlingen, Texas. Her father, Captain Cecil Bryant, an Air Force pilot and veteran of World War II and the Korean War, was killed when a military transport plane he was flying crashed near Atlanta due to engine failure. He was only 3 years old when he lost his father. Her mother Constance, a Navy nurse in World War II, moved to San Diego with Rosemary and her sisters Libby and Linda when Rosemary was 8 years old.

As a teenager, Rosemary read many books on aviation and took jobs cleaning houses, waiting tables in restaurants, and washing airplanes at local civilian airports to earn money for both her college education and flight school pilot training. Airplane washing, in particular, was a technical, tedious and difficult task, but it kept him close to the planes and earned him more money.

In June 1990, when Colonel Mariner was second-in-command of the squadron he would soon command, speaking of his daughter's determination to fly, her mother told the Los Angeles Times: "I was worried because her father had died in a plane crash, but she was so determined to do it that I felt I shouldn't stop her."

During his final years in the Navy, Colonel Mariner attended the National War College in Washington, D.C., earned a master's degree in national security strategy and served on the staff of the Joint Chiefs of Staff at the Pentagon. After retiring from the Navy, he taught military history at the University of Tennessee in Knoxville.

In an interview, he said: "There have been numerous and remarkable positive changes in the armed forces to date. "But what I'm concerned about is that there are still these reports of sexual assault, sexism and criminal activity that keep coming out, so it's not really over, it's ongoing."

Nevertheless, she emphasized the quality and importance of the perseverance that has served her and other female soldiers well to this day.

A soldier is a soldier first, whether male or female

In an article he wrote for the U.S. Armed Forces magazine, Mariner emphasized what he had always believed throughout his naval career: "man or woman, a soldier is a soldier first". She wanted to be a member of the armed forces as a fighter jet pilot, and she became one. She neither asked for exclusion nor privilege. She performed her duty by applying the characteristics of her job description in the best possible way, and became an example, an idol. 

He was the idol and Commander of the People's Hero F-18 and Boeing 737 pilot Tammie Jo Shults

In fact, on April 17, 2018, as the captain of Southwest Airlines Flight 1380, Tammie Jo Shultz, a retired US Navy F-18 pilot, became an American hero when one of the engines of the plane she was flying failed and stalled, a piece of the failed engine caused damage to the fuselage, the other engine of the twin-engine plane started to perform abnormally, and she landed a Boeing 737-700 safely at the nearest airport. When Shultz was a Mariner squadron commander, she was one of the female pilots under her command. They became close friends in retirement.

F-18 and Boeing 737 pilot and folk hero Tammie Jo Shults flew under Squadron Commander Rosemary Mariner.

A First in US History

For the first time in U.S. history, the U.S. Naval Air Force honored Colonel Mariner with an all-female four-arm funeral tribute flight with F-18s, the Navy's front-line main combat aircraft.

All of the Navy's female combat pilots volunteered to fly the US Navy's first female combat jet fighter pilot and first female combat squadron commander to her final resting place. However, the funeral honors flight was a state funeral for the fallen heroic comrades-in-arms with 4 planes, 4 planes was both a written and a customary rule that there should be neither one more nor one less plane.  The tribute flight had to be carried out with a column of 4 (4 aircraft formation). 

What did the US Naval Air Force do? It selected all four F/A-18E/Fs as "dual-control" (two-pilot) variants, so that instead of four, eight female fighter jet pilots paid their respects to their pioneer comrade by flying in his memory.

9 F/A-18E/F Super Hornet female pilots, including 1 spare

A quadruple F/A-18E/F Super Hornet task force flyover in honor of Rosemary Mariner, flown by female pilots.

During Mariner's burial ceremony, history was made while honoring the legacy of Rosemary Mariner, the first female fighter pilot of the United States Navy, by conducting the "Missing WoMan Flyover" with an all-female F/A-18E/F task force for the first time in US history. This ceremonial flyover represented the resumption of the missions of the comrades she left behind as one of the aircraft (No. 3) left the formation and climbed vertically into the heavens, with No. 4 immediately filling in for her."

Rosemary Mariner, when she was a squadron commander.

Rosemary Mariner said; "life may surprise you a lot, but you will hold on tighter to life and the struggle, you will not get stuck there and you will never let go".

3,500 hours of combat jet fighter flight in 15 different jet fighters, 17 tours of duty on an aircraft carrier (one tour lasting 6-8 months), flying from an aircraft carrier, commanding a combat squadron with the most crowded and complex missions were not easy tasks, especially for a woman who could and tried to serve at equal or even higher levels than men in a male-dominated environment.

This brave, idealistic and combative woman never gave up on life and struggle, until cancer, which she had fought for 5 years without giving up, defeated her.