Woman Faced Tough Odds in Botched Pilot Training

She was a “poster girl for women’s aviation,” accomplished, ambitious and maybe more than a little abrasive. They were male fighter pilots of the old school, cocky, clannish and wary of the forces threatening their traditionally all-male warrior culture.

When these two sides collided within a New York Air National Guard unit, the result was one of the most destructive explosions of gender conflict since the integration of women in the military began.

One year after Maj. Jacquelyn S. Parker began training to become the Air Guard’s first female F-16 pilot, her fighter career was over, two superiors had been ousted in disgrace and the 174th Fighter Wing was on its way to a top-to-bottom reorganization.

As the armed forces move women into new roles, the sad tale of the 174th stands as an object lesson. When undermined by poor management and personal antagonism, these efforts are doomed to fail.

Left behind at the Syracuse-based wing is a debate that rages still: Did Parker fail to win her combat wings because male fliers campaigned to keep her out of a groundbreaking role? Or did she simply lack the right stuff?

Whatever the answer, the botched effort to train Parker, who now lives in Placentia, “portrays a failure of leadership at all levels,” New York Inspector General Roslynn R. Mauskopf said in a post-mortem of the incident.

The missteps began as far back as April 1993, when then-Defense Secretary Les Aspin ordered combat pilot positions opened to women.

Maj. Gen. Michael Hall, who as New York adjutant general was the state’s top military official, moved quickly to arrange combat training of female fliers. He hoped to show the state’s good faith, generate some favorable publicity and perhaps help ward off threatened cutbacks in the New York Guard.

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Parker, then 33, seemed to have the dream resume: The 15-year veteran was the first woman graduate of the Air Force Test Pilot School at Edwards Air Force Base, Calif., a former NASA spaceflight controller and a pilot with 3,300 hours of flying time.

Her accomplishments had attracted the attention of Air Force Secretary Sheila Widnall and First Lady Hillary Rodham Clinton, and she became a minor celebrity who made TV and personal appearances as a symbol of the new gender-integrated Air Force. She was “a poster girl for women’s aviation,” the state report said.

Yet in the 174th, a unit with about 18 F-16 fighters and about 30 personnel, her reception was hardly warm.

The fliers, identified by shoulder patches as “The Boys From Syracuse,” were prepared to add women to their all-male ranks, state investigators concluded later, noting that another woman, a former Navy pilot, was successfully trained at about the same time.

But they suspected that Hall chose Parker more for her celebrity than her flying skills, which they considered inferior to those of some other Navy women.

They knew Parker was a friend of Hall’s and were unhappy that he made the choice, rather than Guard officials who would supervise her, the state report found.

“Parker personified many of their worst fears about gender integration: Women pilots selected for training would be selected not because of their skills or experience, but based on politics and gender,” the inspector general’s report said.

And Parker’s personality did not help. The report found that the slender, athletic blond was a “politically connected, ambitious, self-centered individual that the other pilots simply did not like”--though many male fighter pilots have the same brashness and ego.

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Dropping names, talking about career prospects she hoped would take her far beyond western New York, “she was always trying to be the center of attention,” Maj. Anthony Basile later told investigators. In her first weekend with the 174th, “we just heard the Jackie Parker story for about 14 hours,” he said.

Though the unit still indulged in some practical jokes and sexist jibes among males, the state report found that many men were put off when they heard coarse anatomical language from Parker, or saw her rubbing a male pilot’s behind because, as she put it later, “I knew it drove him totally nuts.”

The pilots told state investigators about one night when Parker went to dinner with them wearing ripped jeans that exposed her muscled behind. Some grumbled, too, that her training was often interrupted by her public appearances, the report noted.

With a business card that read “Mankiller,” Parker was unapologetic about her style. In this all-male world, it was difficult to be “accepted as a woman,” she told investigators, and the salty talk and swaggering manner was “my way of putting them at ease.”

Parker quickly developed a close relationship with the unit’s operations chief, Col. Robert A. Rose, a 26-year veteran of the wing, investigators found.

Such personal relationships between superior and subordinate are forbidden in the military--whether sexual or not--because it suggests favoritism.

Rose found Parker fascinating and became close with her “right off the bat,” he said later. Before long, they were sailing and rock-climbing together, sharing wine on the beach and dinners together, the inspector general found. The pair chatted between their F-16s on specially chosen radio frequencies they hoped would remain secret, according to the state report.

The other pilots resented the attention and leniency they thought Parker received in training from Rose and Air Guard boss Hall, who continued to keep tabs on her advancement, according to the investigators.

Parker’s training had gone unevenly, and sometimes poorly, according to the inspector general. She required three times the minimum number of test flights needed to complete the instruction program.

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On one outing, she bombed the wrong target five times. While she acknowledged some of her shortcomings, she quickly began to resent that trainers required her to perform the same tasks over and over again, even though she had gotten passing grades.

“They’d say, ‘Do you want us to lower our standards?’ And it went on like this for . . . months,’ ” she said in a 1995 interview.

At the same time, some pilots began harassing Parker and Rose with crude jokes, and at the 1994 Christmas party they gave Rose a “Most Disgusting Duke” award that pointedly noted his relationship with Parker.

Five months later, after issuing several warnings to Rose about the relationship, the wing commander, Col. David Hamlin, removed him from his post and put him in a headquarters job. The male pilots admired Rose and blamed Parker, investigators found later.

The timing could not have been worse for Parker. At about the same time, in May 1995, New York’s incoming Republican governor, George Pataki, replaced Hall, a Democratic appointee, with a new adjutant general.

In a twinkling, Parker had lost both of her prime benefactors--and her F-16 training had reached a critical phase. Indeed, in June 1995, she failed her final flying test and it was clear she would never pilot an F-16.

But Parker’s response set off an explosion at the 174th. She complained to the new adjutant general, Maj. Gen. John Fenimore, that she had been mistreated.

Fenimore convened an investigative board, which concluded in October 1995 that Parker had been flunked in part because of bias against women. It ordered reprimands or transfers of five wing officers and fliers.

Investigators also concluded that the wing commander, Hamlin, had been wrong about Rose’s involvement with Parker, finding that the relationship had been platonic, and ordered Hamlin transferred for wrongly ousting Rose.

Although Parker was formally reprimanded for her “inappropriate touching and commentary,” Fenimore’s investigation largely accepted her contention that she had been the victim of sex discrimination.

But then events took an unexpected turn.

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In January 1996, one day before Rose put in for retirement, he came forward with a sworn statement declaring he had lied by claiming his relationship with Parker was not romantic. The admission threw the first investigation into doubt, and Pataki ordered a second one.

The second report, released last month, reached substantially different conclusions. It faulted Rose and Parker for a destructive and unprofessional relationship. It found that Hamlin had correctly sought to end the Rose-Parker relationship in May 1995, though it said his efforts to straighten out the mess had been “too little, too late.”

This report faulted some fliers for sexist and unprofessional conduct in the wing. Yet it did not find that the pilots’ attitudes toward Parker were motivated by gender bias; rather, they turned against her because of her behavior and their perceptions of favoritism, the report said.

At the same time, the investigation sharply criticized the quality of the training Parker received. It said evaluations of Parker’s flying skills were “completely subjective” and had been polluted by the other fliers’ attitudes of “resentment, distrust and antagonism.”

Perhaps most tragically, the report found that while there were clear weaknesses in Parker’s flying, the biases in her training program meant “no one will ever know if she had the right stuff.”

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Many in the 174th found the second report scarcely more satisfactory than the first, claiming it placed too much blame on the wing and not enough on Parker and military leaders who put her there.

Some pilots contend the military has tried to conceal wrongdoing by the leadership; they are still appealing to public officials, including members of Congress, to investigate further.

“It’s a clear cover-up,” said Lt. Col. John Whiteside, whose military flying career was ended when the wing’s new commander, citing doubts about his “fitness to command,” transferred him to a desk job.

Parker, who now works at a Southern California software company and holds a part-time administrative job with the 129th Air National Guard in Mountain View, declined to be interviewed for this story.

Her attorney, Susan Barnes, denied Parker had an improper relationship with Rose and portrayed her trouble at the wing as the result of the fliers’ resistance to opening their ranks to women.

As for the allegations about Parker’s romantic involvement, Barnes said they reflected “the classic treatment of women who succeed in pioneering jobs.” Barnes claimed Parker had to fend off Rose’s advances and that Rose changed his story about the relationship because of strong pressure from the males who were his friends for years.

Rose, reached at his home in Fayetteville, N.Y., said he had “no comment on the matter whatsoever.”

Despite their stark differences on most of what happened in Syracuse, most who were connected with the wing would probably agree with at least one of the report’s conclusions. The failed effort, it said, “constitutes a missed opportunity of historic proportions that can never be regained.”