Running the Gauntlet
July 4, 2022 8:26 PM   Subscribe

For Lt. Kara Hultgreen, the F-14 started out as a consolation prize. The 29-year-old hotshot had wanted to fly an F/A-18 Hornet, the sharpest and newest member of the Navy’s fleet. But after a few months of training, the F-14 won Hultgreen’s heart. She came to consider it a remarkable plane, complicated and humbling.
posted by ChrisR (35 comments total) 14 users marked this as a favorite
 
A well-written article. A remarkable woman. Salute.
posted by davidmsc at 11:08 PM on July 4, 2022 [3 favorites]


Wow. That was an amazing story, I read the entire thing and went through all the feelings on that one. So much badassery.
posted by lemonade at 11:09 PM on July 4, 2022


Is MetaFilter just doing propaganda now?

Well, the article details that the armed forces are a hideously misogynistic institution that freely slanders women instead of admitting to mechanical faults in their aircraft. I do wince a little at the "fighter pilot dream" narrative, but the rest isn't much of a recruiting spiel.
posted by solarion at 11:50 PM on July 4, 2022 [21 favorites]


Is MetaFilter just doing propaganda now?

What do you mean? Potatoes weren't even mentioned once in the article.
posted by Literaryhero at 11:59 PM on July 4, 2022 [24 favorites]


Propaganda? I thought this was more advertising for Top Gun.
posted by meowzilla at 12:30 AM on July 5, 2022 [1 favorite]


part of history
posted by busted_crayons at 1:39 AM on July 5, 2022 [8 favorites]


Mavericks long overdue trial for sexual assault? 🤔🤔🤔
posted by Jacen at 3:12 AM on July 5, 2022 [1 favorite]


Lovely. I salute all our women the all the armed forces. We need more like you.
posted by Czjewel at 6:51 AM on July 5, 2022 [2 favorites]


Yes, this is propaganda, for an air force that has killed any number of civilians in US imperialist wars.

It also shows how, in an imperialist society, groups have to demonstrate their willingness to uphold structures of empire and oppression in exchange for being granted improved status within that society. While this improved status kind of looks like progress, it's really a means by which such societies can exert control. And this improved status can never be granted to everyone, as there must be someone left to exploit for the whole thing to work.

Sorry.
posted by Zarkonnen at 7:12 AM on July 5, 2022 [17 favorites]


This article could only be seen as propaganda for the Air Force if one recalls that Kara Hultgreen was in the Navy.
posted by Etrigan at 7:21 AM on July 5, 2022 [14 favorites]


This article is supposed to be read as an argument against the idea of positive discrimination - it is propaganda, saying that strong, tough people (of any gender) can join the military and succeed. It's arguing against the ideas seen in the wikipedia entry for Hultgreen, that she was promoted too far and too fast, and that's why she crashed.

As Zarkonnen said, this is a story detailing improved status for a minority group. It helps that Hultgreen is dead; there's no messy difficult later period, like coming out of the military and becoming an alcoholic, standing for election as a maga-supremacist, or driving across the country wearing diapers in order to kill somebody.
posted by The River Ivel at 7:27 AM on July 5, 2022 [4 favorites]


I'm sorry, I meant, "for a navy that has killed any number of civilians in US imperialist wars using its naval air force".
posted by Zarkonnen at 7:30 AM on July 5, 2022 [2 favorites]


Yes, from the well-known military propagandists at... Vox Media?

There is such a thing as simply saying to oneself "This thread is not for my tastes" and moving on to another.
posted by The Pluto Gangsta at 7:35 AM on July 5, 2022 [27 favorites]


Well, speaking as a Canadian who more or less completely detests the US's military machine... I can assure you, I didn't post this out of some jingoistic fetishization of the military. I posted it because it was a fascinating story about a badass woman who went through the shit and thrived. I also posted it because, while I had sort of heard of "tailhook", this was the first time I'd ever read a description of the actual scandal, and it interested me.

So, if you don't mind, take your accusations (deleted or not) of propagandizing and shove 'em, would you kindly?
posted by ChrisR at 7:48 AM on July 5, 2022 [27 favorites]


It helps that Hultgreen is dead; there's no messy difficult later period, like coming out of the military and becoming an alcoholic, standing for election as a maga-supremacist, or driving across the country wearing diapers in order to kill somebody.

How the fuck is "It helps that [the person the article is about] is dead, which means there's no evidence of all this other shit I'm going to make up that I totally believe would have happened despite having no evidence" a reasonable comment?
posted by a faithful sock at 7:51 AM on July 5, 2022 [15 favorites]


A great article. The worst part of all this is we will never know if Hultgreen made a mistake or not because of the horrible politics she faced. What a tragic story.
posted by geoff. at 7:52 AM on July 5, 2022


It helps that Hultgreen is dead; there's no messy difficult later period, like coming out of the military and becoming an alcoholic, standing for election as a maga-supremacist, or driving across the country wearing diapers in order to kill somebody.

This is some weird zombie strawman misogynistic shit. None of these things happened, so why?
posted by swift at 7:52 AM on July 5, 2022 [10 favorites]


To be clear, I have absolutely nothing against Hultgreen, who according to the article wanted to be an astronaut, got into military aviation because of that, and was then treated horrendously.

I started reading the article with interest, but I couldn't get through because of the "fighter pilot dream" narrative, as if wanting to be a fighter pilot in a military with so much blood on its hands was something the reader would obviously sympathise with. So it may not be intentional propaganda as much as an article written from the perspective of people who subjected to that propaganda.
posted by Zarkonnen at 7:53 AM on July 5, 2022 [6 favorites]


Without addressing politics or misogyny or the utter bullshit of Tailhook or any other "baggage" - I appreciated the article for describing what an amazing young person and officer she was, and highlighting what she and other fighter pilots go through. I of course knew about her, but didn't know about her background. Readers of the article don't have to like or dislike every angle or fact in order to appreciate the article.
posted by davidmsc at 8:07 AM on July 5, 2022 [2 favorites]


worth reading, I learned things

I'm not sure how a person checks that article out and comes away focused on the military propaganda angle.. I mean, I suppose it's there if you look hard enough, but I kind of couldn't see it for the vivid description of the shitty misogyny and just sheer gumption of Hultgreen. It's a damn shame we fill our movie theatres and pay good money to watch short Scientologists reprise stupid roles, when we could be watching movies about Hultgreen
posted by elkevelvet at 8:33 AM on July 5, 2022 [5 favorites]


My sister's a badass and my daughter's a rising badass. I love the passion and courage and determination these women showed by excelling in a difficult, male-dominated field. Thanks for posting, ChrisR.

It's arguing against the ideas seen in the wikipedia entry for Hultgreen, that she was promoted too far and too fast, and that's why she crashed.

The Wikipedia article seems pretty biased against her. From the posted article:
Some months later, pilots from one F-14 squadron flew multiple simulated versions of Hultgreen’s accident as a training exercise. Even knowing exactly what was going to happen and when, just one of the aviators, a commanding officer with years of experience, managed to salvage the plane.
...
Hultgreen’s grades showed that she had been at the top of her class for day landings and ranked third overall in a class of seven. She had been a very fine F-14 pilot.
The Tailhook stuff was awful, but I was impressed how Hultgreen defended herself. It reminded me of an incident where my sister put a man behaving badly in his place with similar poise.
posted by kirkaracha at 10:22 AM on July 5, 2022 [1 favorite]


I'm not even surprised that the response to this article ignores Lt. Hultgreen herself, honestly. Her career was overshadowed by the misogyny in the Navy and now one tries to overshadow it with imperialism or propaganda. There is not a single word in the article that justifies or excuses either.

Let her be a person. This was her choice, her fight, and she clawed her way up through the most misogynistic branch of the American armed forces so she could fly a fucking plane like she knew she could.
posted by lydhre at 11:44 AM on July 5, 2022 [6 favorites]


I joined the Navy in 1991 - by accepting an ROTC scholarship for college. I, too, wanted to be an astronaut when I was a young woman coming up. If you wanted to be an astronaut in those days, the clearest path was becoming a military pilot. That basically meant Navy or Air Force and between the two, the Navy actually had better odds for flight school at the time and a better record for NASA selection (some of this is historical - the Air Force was pretty young when the first Astronaut classes were selected).

The military and the image of the military in 1991 was very different than it is now. Post cold-war, pre-911, the military was seen as a scholarship / jobs program more than anything. The first gulf war had been a cakewalk and the perception was that any upcoming conflict would follow that model - quick, clean, relatively bloodless. I had a father who'd done 21 years and grew up surrounded by Navy bases to the extent that one of my first jobs was as an intern on a Naval base.

1991 was a couple of years after the Naval Academy had a hazing scandal involving handcuffing women to urinals. I commissioned and started flight school in 1995 in the wake of Tailhook and Kara Hultgreen and other incidents that never made the news.

I went to college with pretty clear eyes on what the risks were although knowing and experiencing are different things. I was, I guess, lucky? The crappy behavior I experienced was limited and I had more men who treated me as an equal and acted like they wanted me there than the opposite. I went to flight school similarly 'forewarned' - by that time my dreams of being an astronaut had cooled somewhat and I ended up flying helicopters for the Navy. I never knew Kara but her story colored my time at flight school and in my early years - there was a undercurrent - were the women being graded easier? Harder? Pushed ahead? Held back? It's hard to know what the reality was - I never felt like I got special treatment one way or the other but I also self isolated as a risk avoidance technique so I don't feel I have a good understanding of what other student pilots were going through.

I look at what some of my classmates achieved on the civilian side and I think the Navy was a good choice for me at the time although I'm not sure I'd repeat the decision in this day and age.
posted by macfly at 12:45 PM on July 5, 2022 [21 favorites]


I'm not sure how a person checks that article out and comes away focused on the military propaganda angle..

I wonder if a lot of this isn't the graphic design of the page, which is somewhat at odds with the tone and content of the article. As for the article itself....

It's an odd work that doesn't really do justice to any of its subjects. There are three themes:

* Hultgreen's life, career, and early death
* The culture of misogyny in the Navy (esp. the Tailhook Scandal)
* Still's career

The narrative doesn't so much weave between the subjects but jumps around between them and males it difficult to tell what issue the writer wanted to underline. Hultgreen definitely had an interesting life and accomplished a great deal, regardless of any reader's feelings about the profession she was in. I'm very dubious about the military, and I wonder a bit about the suggestion that Hultgreen saw it as a way to get into space, given her focus on an active combat role, but the article strongly suggests that Hultgreen's efforts allowed Still to make that leap eventually, so....

Anyway, I get why some readers saw this as propaganda for the military, but I see this more as the story of a complicated woman who wasn't served all that well by the her story is told this instance.
posted by GenjiandProust at 1:04 PM on July 5, 2022 [3 favorites]


The narrative doesn't so much weave between the subjects but jumps around between them and males it difficult to tell what issue the writer wanted to underline.

And apparently confusing some readers about which aviator wanted to become an astronaut. Other than the line "She would spend hours watching Star Trek, but while most kids of her generation simply watched it, Hultgreen pledged to live it," most of the mentions of NASA ambitions are about Still.
posted by kirkaracha at 2:47 PM on July 5, 2022 [1 favorite]


Yeah, I found the bits about Still mixed into the narrative a bit confusing, but it was a really good read and brings into focus (while reading, at least) the challenges that women had and still have in being considered equal to men. Such a tragedy that she ended up dying in a way that gave critics the opening to blame her and justify their whole bullshit views that women don't belong in combat.
posted by dg at 9:23 PM on July 5, 2022 [1 favorite]


I was wondering about something else entirely... I know nothing about fighter planes. Hultgreen's crash was caused by applying rudder, which caused a compressor stall essentially immediately. This sounds absolutely ridiculous, like a slapstick comedy level technical problem. It's like I turned left a bit too far and all the wheels came off my car. How are such planes even allowed in the air? Or is this understandable/excusable somehow, am I missing something here?
posted by Pyrogenesis at 11:28 PM on July 5, 2022


I don't think the story actually says the stall was due to rudder application? It does say: 'The left engine had experienced an interruption of airflow that caused it to stop producing thrust, ...' which, combined with 'noticed she was right of the centerline, and started to correct her position. ... the left engine sputtered and seemed to fail', perhaps suggests it. I'm not a fighter pilot or any kind of pilot if paper planes don't count, but I read these two things as not related. I guess, if the plane skewed its nose far enough to the left in response to left rudder, it could have disturbed the airflow to the left engine enough to stall it at low speed? Some quick Googling suggests the earlier F-14s were susceptible to compressor stalls at low altitude and high angle of attack.
posted by dg at 11:49 PM on July 5, 2022


Yeah the article's version is vague and just lists some things that happened, so I looked at what wikipedia has to say and it's very straightforward: "Hultgreen attempted to correct her approach by applying left rudder pedal, which caused the nose to disrupt the airflow over the left (inside) wing, as well as the airflow to the left engine intake. The port engine suffered a compressor stall and lost power"

However, there's no source listed for these claims.
posted by Pyrogenesis at 12:10 AM on July 6, 2022


I can quote what my pilot husband said about the accident, when I asked him to explain the mechanics to me: "sounds like she lost thrust in her port engine for whatever reason and it induced a stall. That, coupled with the asymmetric thrust from an engine out scenario spells serious trouble. Fighter planes are notoriously hard to control at slow speeds because their wing design is optimized for high speed flight. And the Tomcat was a big, heavy fighter so yeah, it was probably nearly impossible for her to recover and save the plane that close to the ground."

And when I asked him whether she ejected late or was just unlucky he said: "my guess it was "late" but we're talking about seconds here. By the time she ejected she had stalled and rolled to port, sounds like"

Of course, we all know why she ejected "late", even split seconds late: because she had the extra pressure of an entire gender resting on her shoulders. Crash the plane and they don't blame just you, they blame women aviators as a whole. And she was right, they did.
posted by lydhre at 4:49 AM on July 6, 2022 [4 favorites]


In The Right Stuff, blaming the deceased pilot is a coping mechanism for the other Navy test pilots:
Then one sunny day a member of the Group, one of the happy lads they always had dinner with and drank with and went waterskiing with, was coming in for a landing at the base in an A3J attack plane. He let his airspeed fall too low before he extended his flaps, and the ship stalled out, and he crashed and was burned beyond recognition. And they brought out the bridge coats and sang about those in peril in the air and put the bridge coats away, and the Indians who were left talked about the accident after dinner one night. They shook their heads and said it was a damned shame, but he should have known better than to wait so long before lowering the flaps.

Barely a week had gone by before another member of the Group was coming in for a landing in the same type of aircraft, the A3J, making a ninety-degree turn to his final approach, and something went wrong with the controls, and he ended up with one rear stabilizer wing up and the other one down, and his ship rolled in like a corkscrew from 800 feet up and crashed, and he was burned beyond recognition. And the bridge coats came out and they sang about those in peril in the air and then they put the bridge coats away and after dinner one night they mentioned that the departed had been a good man but was inexperienced, and when the malfunction in the controls put him in that bad corner, he didn't know how to get out of it.

Every wife wanted to cry out: "Well, my God! The machine broke! What makes any of you think you would have come out of it any better!" Yet intuitively Jane and the rest of them knew it wasn't right even to suggest that. Pete never indicated for a moment that he thought any such thing could possibly happen to him. It seemed not only wrong but dangerous to challenge a young pilot's confidence by posing the question. And that, too, was part of the unofficial protocol for the Officer's Wife. From now on every time Pete was late coming in from the flight line, she would worry. She began to wonder if—no! assume!—he had found his way into one of those corners they all talked about so spiritedly, one of those little dead ends that so enlivened conversation around here.

Not long after that, another good friend of theirs went up in an F-4, the Navy's newest and hottest fighter plane, known as the Phantom. He reached twenty thousand feet and then nosed over and dove straight into Chesapeake Bay. It turned out that a hose connection was missing in his oxygen system and he had suffered hypoxia and passed out at the high altitude. And the bridge coats came out and they lifted a prayer about those in peril in the air and the bridge coats were put away and the little Indians were incredulous. How could anybody fail to check his hose connections? And how could anybody be in such poor condition as to pass out that quickly from hypoxia?
posted by kirkaracha at 9:16 AM on July 6, 2022 [2 favorites]


In The Right Stuff, blaming the deceased pilot is a coping mechanism for the other Navy test pilots:

Blaming the driver of a car or the pedestrian for doing things wrong is far easier than making any changes. That's why the actual FAA investigates every civilian airline crash to determine if the pilot truly was at fault or if faulty design or maintenace was the culprit. This process works really well.

A friend actually writes code to collect failure conditions and operating data for military fighter jets mostly to gauge enemy capabilities since their planes also occasionally get shot down. He's too young to have been involved in data collection for this case, but every one since 2000- he probably knows about it.
posted by The_Vegetables at 9:35 AM on July 6, 2022


the propaganda angle has been quite visible in this thread, thanks

clearly, some wish to engage with the subject via different lenses/perspectives

may we? thanks
posted by elkevelvet at 9:35 AM on July 6, 2022 [2 favorites]


Metafilter: [deleted comment]
posted by Samuel Farrow at 8:30 PM on July 6, 2022


It's a good article, well written, but kinda thin in some areas.

If you're going to talk about female F-14 pilots, why not reach out to Carey Lorenz, who was the first female F-14 pilot who was grounded because of a smear campaign for, essentially, being too female to fly the F-14.

Or reach out to Loree Draude who was an F/A-18 support pilot who transitioned to the S3-B Viking flying from the Abe Lincoln when Lt. Hultgreen suffered her fatal crash off that carrier.

This isn't ancient history, the Navy's gender integration just didn't just happen magically, it's a result of decades of smart campaigning. Hats off to the the tough-as-shit women fighting for their spot on the front line.
posted by peeedro at 5:23 PM on July 9, 2022 [1 favorite]


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