Last October, an F-14A Tomcat warplane stalled as it approached the aircraft carrier Abraham Lincoln to land. The pilot had four seconds to eject, reacted too late, and was killed.
Then came the innuendo campaign. Anonymous callers to talk radio shows suggested the pilot was not competent, had been rushed into a combat role for political reasons, had failed to handle the emergency properly, had been given below-average grades in flight school.Was the pilot an admiral's son given preferential treatment? No, merely a woman. In the wake of the Tailhook scandal, the theory went, the Navy needed to promote women, so it rushed female pilots into combat roles prematurely.
Lt. Kara Hultgreen, the first woman combat pilot of the F-14A, was the tragic victim of this policy.
Now, after an extensive investigation, the Navy says an equipment malfunction caused Lt. Hultgreen's death, not pilot error. In fact, when the Navy presented the same situation to a squadron of nine pilots on a flight simulator, only one - the commander - took the right action to survive, even though all had been warned to expect trouble.
"This was a gender-neutral accident," Rear Adm. Robert Spane told ABC-TV's "Nightline." When the next servicewoman dies in the line of duty, let the reaction be gender-neutral, too.