LEARN about the US Army’s first female rotary-wing aviators
affairs for the rest of my military career, because I felt that sometimes aviation issues or vocabulary got misconstrued in the civilian world because they don’t “speak” aviation.
Wait, another first!? Yeah! I was the aviation headquarters company commander in air traffic control in Bavaria. I was responsible for maintaining all the helicopters in the battalion. When I completed my com- mand, I took a public affairs course and was sent to NATO in Belgium, where I was a public affairs officer covering the United States and the United Kingdom. Then, in 1989, I was assigned as a pub- lic affairs officer at the Pentagon for the secretary of defense, who was Dick Cheney at the time. After four years there, I ended up retiring as a lieutenant colonel.
What did you do after leaving the service? Did you continue to fly? No. I didn’t fly again. I would have stayed in the army longer, but my health started to bother me. I didn’t
know what was wrong; I just knew I was tired all the time. When I retired, I think I slept for two years. I was in my early 50s. It wasn’t until much later, after I moved to New Mexico, that they properly diagnosed that I had a serious thyroid problem. It had been misdiag- nosed all those years. I know how to take care of it now. I’m actually starting to feel a lot better.
Is there anything special that stands out from your flying career? I feel like I had angel wings attached to me somewhere, because I had some serious things happen that could have ended my life but didn’t. One of them was an engine failure in Germany. I had a full load of 13 people. We sank like a rock, but I put it into an oat field as pretty as you please. A perfect landing. Another time, I had a transmission
failure, and usually you don’t live to tell about those. I had just finished a test flight, and I was throttling down when suddenly the blades stopped turning. I told the crew chief to tie them down. He looped the strap over the blade
and was tugging at it. I was getting on him to hurry up when he says, “Ma’am, I’m trying. The blades won’t move.” I thought, “Oh crap, it’s a transmission failure.” So, as I said, the angels waited until I was on the ground before they seized it up. Another incident was when I was
helping the [US Army] Pathfinders do some night maneuvers in an OH-58. We were flying with the main lights off, and we were only using what’s called “cat eyes,” which were very small lights. Out of the corner of my eye, I thought I saw something squirt out of the battery port mounted on the helicopter nose area. I checked it again when we went around the traffic pattern. I made sure to keep an eye on the battery gauge. It was OK. The next time I checked, it was pegged out. It turned out I had a runaway bat- tery fire. We landed and I started yelling, “Get out! Get out! Get out!” I throttled that aircraft down as fast as I could and we got the heck out of there. Turns out, what I saw out of the
corner of my eye was the battery fluid spurting out of the top port up near the windshield. I knew I saw something, but those cat eyes didn’t leave enough light to really see it. It could have exploded very easily and blown the nose off. Luckily, we shut it down fast enough that it didn’t go and take any of us with it. It was melted about a third of the way down. Jen Boyer is a journalist and marketing communicator specializing in aviation. She holds commercial, instrument, flight instructor, and instrument instructor ratings in helicopters and a private rating in airplanes.
Linda McDonald DuMoulin (far left) and Sally
Murphy (far right) look on as Susan Dunwoody Schoeck receives her wings in 1975. The three women were the US Army’s first female rotary wing aviators. (Sally Murphy Photo)
DEC 2024 POWER UP 23
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