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Ivan G Thompson
a book bubble about
The Air Force’s Black Ceiling
Politics & Social Sciences
Author Insight
Historical Black Air Force Pilot Disparities
I have studied the Tuskegee Airmen. I have been to conventions, interviewed them, wrote about them, but I am still learning about these great black heroes. I recently watched an interview with Original Tuskegee Airman Lt Col James Harvey (still living). Harvey was a winner of the inaugural Air Force Top Gun trophy. In this video, I learned something new about the Airmen’s experience in pilot training. The first class of black pilots had a washout rate that was less than the current washout rate of white pilots. That raised such consternation that they fixed the washout rate for black pilots at 10% higher than that of white pilots. This meshes with what I was told in an interview with Original Tuskegee Airman Lt Col Robert Ashby. He told me that they were washing out a lot of capable pilots who were sometimes better than him. He said it was because they didn't want more than a certain number of black pilots. In this book, I wrote about how something similar happened to black fighter pilots in the late 1970s under Gen. Wilbur Creech. In a chapter entitled “The Great Black Out," I show the discriminatory drawdown and purging of black fighter pilots, which I believe is the single greatest contributor to the lack of black fighter pilots today.
Book Excerpt
The Air Force’s Black Ceiling
The Great Black OutThe greatest tragedy of the Creech system is that it not only excluded minority fighter pilots for development but that it eliminated the largest group of senior black fighter pilots with combat experience that the Air Force has ever seen. According to Mike Worden author of the Rise of The Fighter Generals, “Doctrinal, procurement, and budgetary shifts towards tactical airpower in the 1970s manifested themselves proportionally in greater numbers of fighter wings, aircraft, and pilots retained during defense cutbacks through the mid-1970s” (Worden, 1998). The greatest reduction of black fighter pilots that the Air Force has ever seen occurred at a time when the Air Force was in great need of fighter pilots and at a time when fighter pilots where being “retained”.The data (see Table) on this drawdown is staggering and was provided in December 2003 by the HQ USAF Directorate of Personnel and approved for release by the Air Force Chief of Staff to the Defense Business Board. In Fiscal Year (FY) 1978 (Gen. Creech’s command tenure: May 1, 1978 thru December 31, 1984) there were 11,724 non-minority fighter pilots and 1,391 minority fighter pilots (948 Capts, 113 Majors, 153 Lt. Colonels, 79 Colonels, 3 Brigadier Generals, one Major General). In FY 1979, there were 11,526 non-minority fighter pilots and only 372 minority fighter pilots (209 Capts, 47 Majors, 29 Lt. Colonels, 11 Colonels, and zero generals). (Gen. Chappie James moved outside the Department of the Air Force). At a time when non-minority fighter pilot reductions were statistically insignificant, minority fighter pilot reductions skyrocketed.
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