1st female fighter pilot tapped as wing commander
She’s logged 2,500 hours in F-15s, 300 of them in combat.
The COLUMBIA, S.C. — woman who became the Air Force’s first female fighter pilot in 1993 is adding another first to her list of achievements.
Col. Jeannie Leavitt becomes the first woman to take command of an Air Force combat fighter wing today in North Carolina.
During her 20 years in the Air Force, Leavitt says she’s familiar with being in its leading ranks of women, but believes she has earned her position through performance.
“It helped that once we started flying, people began to see that we were there because of our abilities, and not our gender,” Leavitt said in a telephone interview. “I don’t see it as a ‘first’ sort of thing. I see it as an incredible opportunity, an incredible honor, to lead a unit with its history and heritage.”
Leavitt, 45, has logged more than 2,500 hours in the F-15 Strike Eagle, including 300 hours flying in combat, primarily in Iraq and Afghanistan.
She takes over the 4th Fighter Wing at Seymour Johnson Air Force Base, one of only three units of F-15Es.
Leavitt will be in charge of the wing’s 5,000 activeduty men and women, with 12,000 civilians in the base population.
She’s married to another Air Force colonel and they have two children.
She entered the Air Force in 1992 through ROTC after earning a degree in aerospace engineering at the University of Texas. Since then, Leavitt added four master’s degrees and a number of military medals, such as a Bronze Star.
With high scores in her undergraduate classes, Leavitt earned a place as the first woman to enter training as a fighter pilot.
When women were first permitted to fly combat missions in 1993, she became the Air Force’s first female fighter pilot.
She then became the first female to graduate from the Air Force Weapons School, where she also became an instructor.
She takes command from Col. Patrick Doherty after serving a year in Washington on a special assignment as an Air Force fellow with the Central Intelligence Agency.