Flying an F-14,
I can't even believe is legal.
This airplane was infamous.
It flew at over twice the speed of sound.
You have to be able to think at high speeds
and react.
But people still didn't think that
women should be flying fighter jets.
All I wanted desperately was just to blend in.
I definitely learned having courage
means you have to feel the fear
and go for it anyway.
In 1994, I became one of the first women
to fly the F-14 Tomcat.
It's one of the most glamorous
as well as one of the most lethal airplanes ever built.
It was made popular by the movie "Top Gun."
I feel the need,
the need for speed!
Ow!
I definitely knew from early on that I always wanted to fly.
In 1991, I graduated from Aviation Officer Candidate school,
and I knew from the beginning I wanted to fly fighters,
because those pilots were the cream of the crop.
But there's a law in place at that time
that says women are not allowed to be assigned to fly fighter jets.
It's in view of their distinguished service, blanket denial of combat roles
to women strikes many people as outdated and unfair.
I think to myself, well, it takes about two years to get through this program.
So maybe by the time I'm done,
they'll have lifted the law.
The day that my class was filling out their dream sheet,
which is where "Everybody fill out your top six selections," was the day
that the secretary of defense ended up lifting
the law that prohibited women from flying in combat.
The steps we are taking today are historic.
When I heard the news about the combat exclusion law being lifted,
I was so stoked.
When those assignments came out,
based on my performance, I was assigned to fly the F-14 Tomcat.
I remember that first group of female carrier aviators very well.
For 15 years, I was an F-14 radar intercept officer
working with the pilot in the back seat of the Tomcat.
In my years since I've retired from the Navy, I've worked in the media space
as a journalist, specifically on naval aviation.
This airplane is challenging.
You're traveling at supersonic airspeeds.
So your adaptability
in the airborne environment has to be 110 percent.
Not everybody walking into the front door of flight school possesses that.
So the F-14 pilots in general were the best
among their peer group.
You go to a community whose identity is in the machismo,
who want to believe that whether it's physical strength or the acuity
to land an airplane, is something that only men can do.
And now you say to him, "Women can do this."
In terms of Carey, in the case of the Tomcat squadron with the wrong leadership,
this is a problem.
There was this perception
as myself and another female pilot came into the squadron
that we were taking over men's positions.
When you hear these little comments, whether it's about your fingernail polish
or your hair or what you're wearing, at times it can feel like water torture.
When you're there to fly this magnificent fighter jet, it chips away at you.
Like, why are we even talking about that stuff?
There were people who made it clear to me that they didn't think
I belonged, that any woman belonged.
And it was devastating to learn that there were people actively
working against our being successful in the cockpit.
And yet here I am,
still trying to figure out how to fly this airplane.
I felt that hot burning of the spotlight.
All I wanted, desperately, was just to blend in
and just be a fighter pilot, not a female fighter pilot.
But you don't always get to dictate
the situation that you find yourself in.
And if you don't work through the hard stuff,
you're never going to get to the awesome.
On that catapult shot,
going from zero to over 200 miles an hour in just under two seconds,
I can't even believe is legal for us to take.
We did a lot of very low-level
flying going 500 miles an hour
to flying really high altitude engagements
where you can literally somedays see the curvature of the Earth.
It was the most difficult airplane ever to land on the aircraft carrier.
It was big, it was heavy,
and it tended to be slightly underpowered.
You're coming across the back
end of that aircraft carrier going about 165 miles an hour,
and you slam down on that deck and come to a complete stop
in just under 1.2 seconds.
The pressure on carrier aviators is unrelenting.
Every landing is graded, day and night, for your entire career.
The missteps that would normally be attributed to
just being a first-tour pilot
were suddenly attributed to the fact that you're a female pilot.
I wasn't perfect.
No pilot on their first deployment is.
These initial pioneers are carrying
the weight of an entire gender on your shoulders.
Because if they failed, it would set
American female status back decades.
One of the interesting things, I think, learning to fly
such a dynamic airplane
with just tons of task saturation and distraction and chaos and fatigue,
you figure out in that environment, calm is your superpower.
But the relentless scrutiny simply because I was a woman,
that was nonstop.
I flew almost a decade in the Navy,
and I also flew the T-34,
the T-2,
the A-4,
and the C-12.
I ended up with about 1,000 hours of flight time
and 172 carrier landings.
And I faced a lot of ups and downs, but I started my career in the cockpit,
and I ended my career in the cockpit, and I wouldn't have it any other way.
Carey's efforts to kick in doors
paved the way for female integration comprehensively.
So now if you visit a squadron you will see a large number of female
naval aviators, and you will see the attitudes of their male counterparts.
There is zero stigma. There is no differentiation. It is a regular thing.
When I got out of the Navy, though,
I didn't really know what I was going to do.
I was tired.
I was unsure.
I didn't know what the future looked like for me.
That transition coming out of the military can really be hard for a lot of people,
trying to figure out how do you put in context
all of these different varied skill sets into civilian-speak.
I was outside,
you know, playing with my kids hair in a ponytail, sidewalk chalk in hand.
One of our neighbors was an executive at a big food company,
and he was having problems with a product rollout,
as simple as that may sound.
I'm like, "OK, what are your resources? What are your threats?"
And in big jumbo sidewalk chalk
I drew this strategic plan for him in under 10 minutes.
And he ran in, got a camera, took a picture,
and next thing you know, I'm starting a strategic planning consulting career.
Then it morphed into doing keynotes.
It takes an entire team to get this job done.
Absolutely.
Not taking a risk is actually one of the biggest risks that you can take.
At the end of the day, it's not about me.
It's "What can somebody do with the lessons that I learned?"
If there's a part of my story that I can share
or there's somebody who looks at me and thinks,
"Oh my gosh, maybe I could do that, too," then it's worth it.
She's thrived
because she is the best representation
of what America can create.
I don't regret being one of the first women to fly the F-14.
I'd do it all over again in a heartbeat.
Courage does not mean the absence of fear.
It means you have to feel the fear and go for it anyway.