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“When you hear these little comments, whether it’s about your fingernail polish or your hair or what you’re wearing at the time, it can feel like the slow drop of Chinese water torture,”

Lohrenz recalls. “When you’re there to fly this magnificent fighter jet, it chips away at you.” Lohrenz and the other inaugural female Navy fighter pilots were perceived as taking jobs away

from their male counterparts, which caused some service members to actively work against their success, she says. “All I wanted desperately was just to blend in and be a fighter pilot, not

a female fighter pilot,” she says. “The plane doesn’t know what gender you are. The plane just wants to fly.” Despite the aerial feats the Tomcat was able to perform, it was one of the more

difficult planes to land on an aircraft carrier. “It was big, it was heavy and it tended to be slightly underpowered,” Lohrenz says. “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.”   Courtesy Carey Lohrenz In 1994, Lohrenz was the only female

F-14 pilot on the USS Abraham Lincoln, making her feel very isolated. “The missteps that would normally be attributed to just being a first tour pilot are suddenly attributed to the fact

that you’re a female pilot,” Carroll says. Lohrenz recalls how the Women Airforce Service Pilots (WASPs), home to the first females to ever fly military aircrafts in World War II, were told

they were no longer needed after the war, despite flying over 2 million hours in the 1940s. “So, knowing that history and understanding that every day I showed up, I was standing on the

shoulders of greatness,” she says. “Calm is your superpower, but the relentless scrutiny simply because I was a woman, that was nonstop.” When the F-14 fighter jet was retired in 2006, 144

of the 632 Navy Tomcats had crashed. But only one of the crashes involved a female pilot.