Navy Aviator Involved in Tailhook Gets Back Pay
WASHINGTON, D.C.
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Overturning a 1995 decision, the Navy has promoted a highly decorated aviator whose career was grounded by the Tailhook sex scandal.
Cmdr. Robert E. Stumpf, who once commanded the Blue Angels precision flying team, has been promoted retroactively to captain and will be given back pay to July 1995, officials said. Now a Federal Express pilot living in Florida, Stumpf retired in late 1996, saying he was tired of fighting for the promotion.
In 1991, Stumpf attended the three-day Tailhook Assn. convention in Las Vegas, where dozens of women complained they were groped and assaulted by drunken pilots. The Defense Department’s inspector general implicated 117 officers in various offenses, including sexual assault and indecent exposure.
Though a board of inquiry in 1993 found no misconduct in Stumpf’s case, the Senate Armed Services Committee said it opposed Stumpf’s promotion, partly on the grounds of its own confidential probe. Former Navy Secretary John H. Dalton pulled his name from a 1995 promotion list.
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