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Today's US Navy Photos & Videos
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On Feb. 28th, a mostly female crew took over the catapults of the carrier Theodore Roosevelt, launching 35 aircraft over the Persian Gulf. Navy officials think it's the first time that's happened in the flattop's 32-year history. (U.S. Navy)
In what’s long been a man’s world of pilots, directors, catapult teams and shooters, women on Feb. 28 took over the carrier Theodore Roosevelt’s flight deck.
Although female sailors have served aboard America’s flattops for two decades, on that sunny morning in the Persian Gulf, 35 women made history.
Records are fuzzy, but it likely marked the first time in the warship’s 32-year life that an overwhelmingly female crew orchestrated the complicated ballet of catapult operations on the flight deck, launching 35 aircraft.
It was a small moment in a seven-month tour that saw the Theodore Roosevelt travel more than 56,000 miles and fly 1,164 combat sorties over Syria, Iraq and Afghanistan, but one pilot thinks it still important.
“I’m kind of speechless about it, honestly,” said Lt. Elizabeth “Lana” Grider, an MH-60S Seahawk helicopter pilot from Marion, Indiana, during a Friday radio call from sea.
Slated to return to North Island on Monday morning with her carrier, Grider served as a yellow-clad “shooter” on the deployment. They’re the supervisors who make sure every sailor is safely positioned before they greenlight a steam catapult to hurl a jet into the air.
“I’m extremely proud of this team. This started at the deck plate level, not the officers,” she said. “They wanted to do this for themselves and take this unique opportunity to launch aircraft with an all-female launch crew, which doesn’t happen too often.”
That sounds easy now, but it really wasn’t when Grider and her junior sailors were planning it.
It takes about 50 crew members working below- and above-deck to launch an aircraft off a carrier, but women comprise only 16 percent of the active-duty Navy.
Although female sailors have come to dominate the ranks of legal clerks and make up increasingly larger numbers of counselors, quartermasters and cooks, less than one out of every five female sailors seizes a spot in the aviation section.
The gender mix of the “Rough Riders” is a little more balanced — one in four aviation section members is a woman — but Grider and her crew had to raid the night shift and two of the other four catapult teams to dragoon enough female aviation boatswain mates to run the launches.
They’re the flurry of grease-splattered green shirts on a flight deck, the sailors who chalk and chain the jets, troubleshoot preflight problems, run the hooks and cables and helm the barricades when the arresting gear fails and the blast plates when the planes roar off.
Aviation Boatswain Mate 2nd Class Esperanza Romero was the one hitting the “fire” button to fling the jets.
“It all comes down to teamwork,” said Romero, of Denver, a supervisor on a mixed male and female team operating the carrier’s bow catapult. “Men and women work together. Yes, aviation boatswain mate’s pretty much a male-dominated rating but more women are going into it and we wanted to show what we can do.
“For this event, we couldn’t have accomplished it without the hard work and dedication of all our junior sailors. The job we do is strenuous and rough and not everyone wants to do it, but they’re proud to do it.”
Aviation Boatswain Mate 3rd Class Teneshia Walton spent the morning feeding data about the planes to the rest of the crew and operating the blast deflector, the steel fence that redirects blowtorch-hot air and debris churned up from jet engines away from sailors and other aircraft.
That job can get even more dangerous when sailors are toiling on rain-swept decks battered by winds, but she loves it.
“It can involve a lot of long hours doing hands-on work but I’m always really excited to get things working, to get it all rolling,” said Walton, of St Louis. “It’s not an easy job but you come to appreciate what you do and those you work with.
“No one person can do all of this. Everyone has a role to play and we work together to do it.”
Although shooter Grider said that the female crews joined together on Feb. 28 to prove something to themselves — not the Navy or the country — news about the launches began to ripple far beyond the Persian Gulf, spread by social media.
“My hope is that a young woman or a young girl might see this story and be inspired to work on a flight deck, too,” Grider said. “You can do this. We proved that.”
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