Capt. Kim Campbell
is an honor graduate of the U S Air Force Academy, Class of
1997. She also holds a degree in International Security Studies
from the University of Reading, England and a Masters in Business
Administration from the University of London, England.
She’s a fighter
pilot, with 120 combat hours in the A-10 Thunderbolt II , a
fighter plane with the inelegant and unladylike
nickname of Warthog. They call her the Killer Chick. (Her radio
call sign is “KC,” which you may interpret as “Kim
Campbell “ or “Killer Chick.”) And she is the
most famous female fighter pilot since Lt. Col. Martha McSally
(see Women
in Blue and Women
in Blue, Round II), who took on the Department of Defense
in court a year or so back.
And won. (Stationed in Saudi Arabia, Lt. Col. McSally challenged
a regulation that required female service personnel to wear the
abaya, the head-to-toe cloak worn by Muslim women, off-base.)
Capt. Campbell didn’t
win her laurels in court, though. She won them in the skies
over hostile territory, Baghdad, giving
air support to ground troops, when her Warthog took a crippling
ground fire hit.
She told Staff Sgt.
Jason Haag, who is with the 332nd Air Expeditionary Public
Affairs office in Iraq (she flew with the 332nd). “I
lost all hydraulics instantaneously (an aircraft’s hydraulic
system controls many of the plane’s key functions), so
I immediately lost control of the jet. It rolled left and pointed
toward the ground, which was an uncomfortable feeling
over Baghdad. The entire caution panel lit up and the jet wasn’t
responding to any of my control inputs.”
She changed her control methods to allow her to fly her plane
without hydraulics.
"The jet started
climbing away from the ground, which was a good feeling because
there was no way I wanted to eject
over Baghdad.”
The hits had come in the rear of the aircraft so the Killer
Chick was unable to see the damage. Her flight leader, a lieutenant
colonel, drew alongside to check out the damage.
"I could not have
asked for a better flight lead,” she
said. “He was very directive when he needed to be, because
all I could concentrate on was flying the jet.”
Once clear of Baghdad,
Killer Chick had two options. Either land the badly damaged
craft or eject (“which I really
didn’t have any interest in doing”).
"The jet was
performing exceptionally well and I had no doubt I was going
to land that airplane.”
And she did. After that, her big problem was keeping it on
the runway and stopping it.
"When you lose
all hydraulics, you don’t have speed
brakes, you don’t have brakes and you don’t have
steering. One of the really cool things that when I did touch
down, I heard several comments on the radio — and I don’t
know who it was — but I heard things like, — 'Awesome
job, great landing,' things like that.”
That was April of
last year. It didn’t take long for
news of her flying feat to spread throughout the Air Force. An
Air Force Times article this April, headlined, “Out
of danger into the limelight,” reported her appearance
at the Smithsonian’s National
Air and Space Museum in
Washington, DC — “aviation’s
version of the Sistine Chapel” — where she was praised
by Chief of Staff Gen. John Jumper before hundreds of Air Force
Association delegates. In the months before, across the country,
newspapers from her home town in San Jose, California, to her
present home station, Pope Air Force Base in North Carolina (where
she is a pilot in the 75th Fighter Squadron) have told her story.
Not long ago Secretary James Roche told it to a group of defense
writers.
The Fighter Chick
told an Air Force Times reporter, ”It’s
all been a little bit overwhelming. I’d gotten a few letters
and e-mails, but when I got back here, saw all the attention,
I realized it was a lot bigger news than I’d thought.”
Among her many letters
and e-mails, is a note written on a napkin from ground troops
thanking her and her fellow Warthog pilots
for their support. The Killer Chick says, “When you get
a note from somebody saying, ‘If you’d been a few
minutes late, I wouldn’t be here now’ — that’s
what it’s all about.”
