She Still Has the Right Stuff : Test Pilot Succeeds Despite Restrictions

After flying some of the world’s most sophisticated fighter planes, one Navy test pilot isn’t allowed to do the whole job that the training intended. That’s because Lt. Beth Hubert is a woman.

Still, if the armed services ever lift their ban on women in combat-related jobs, she says she is ready.

“If you accept the training and the fun of flying those fantastic machines, you also have to accept the jobs they do,” Hubert said.

Last December, she became the first female jet pilot to graduate from the U.S. Naval Test Pilot School here. Now she is the only female jet test pilot among the 82 women and 12,061 men who fly for the Navy. Another woman tests Navy helicopters.

No Women Test Pilots

The Army and Marines have no women test pilots among their respective 14,202 and 4,040 pilots, those services said. The Air Force has 21,115 pilots but doesn’t say how many are test pilots.

Hubert tests rockets, bombs and other attachments to aircraft, to make sure that they don’t interfere with operating the plane.

Cmdr. Bob Walker, chief test pilot for the Strike Aircraft Test Directorate at the Naval Air Test Center here, said Hubert is doing well and is “accepted like another one of the guys.”

Hubert said there is risk involved in her work but added that computer simulation complements her training. “This isn’t the 1950s. It’s not Chuck Yeager going up to a plane and saying, ‘How do you start this?’ and then flying,” she said, referring to the legendary early test pilot.

‘Always a Door’

“You have to believe you can do it,” she said. “When presented with a brick wall, I know I’ll get out. There’s always a door--and sometimes it’s a window.”

Landing on an aircraft carrier means setting a 12,000-pound plane that’s going about 150 m.p.h. down on a runway 300 feet long, she said.

“You only have a 10- to 15-foot block that you have to be in to land safely,” Hubert said. “Too low and you slam into the ramp, too high and you miss the wires that slow the plane down.”

The first time Hubert was catapulted off an aircraft carrier for takeoff was among her most frightening experiences, she said. “You’ll never buy that ride at Disneyland,” she said of the experience seven years ago.

“I made the mistake of holding my breath; it felt like someone hit a hammer in my chest,” she recalled.

Dreams of Space

She has had her head in the clouds since 1961, when she was in first grade and Alan Shepard became the first American in space. Until recently, most astronauts were test pilots first, and Hubert still dreams of going into space.

“The space shuttle is the ultimate (plane),” said Hubert, who has flown everything from a 1940s trainer to the F-18, a sophisticated fighter plane controlled by computers.

Hubert started flying while a student at Washington State University in Pullman after spending summers working for a helicopter company that flew tourists over the Grand Canyon.

When flying, she said, “I look down and think, ‘I have one up on everybody.’ I think most pilots feel this way.”

Heard Ad on Radio

Hubert decided to join the Navy after hearing a radio advertisement that the Navy was looking for women for an experimental flight program.

In 1977, she was accepted into the Naval Aviation Officer Training School and received her commission in February, 1978. She went to Corpus Christi, Tex., to get additional training and earned her wings in June, 1979.