All-female flyover makes history to honor groundbreaking Capt. Rosemary Mariner

Andrew Capps
Knoxville

Correction: A previous version of this story mis-stated the number of jets in the flyover.

Nine female pilots made history on Saturday while honoring the legacy of the United States Navy's first female fighter pilot, Capt. Rosemary Mariner, by performing the first all-female "Missing Man Flyover" during Mariner's funeral in Union County.

Mariner was among the first women to earn her pilot wings in 1974, and the first to fly a tactical fighter jet in 1975. When she took over command of the Navy's Tactical Electronic Warfare Squadron 34 in 1990, she became the first woman to command a naval aviation squadron.

Mariner left the service after 24 years. In 1998, she became a resident scholar at the University of Tennessee's Center for the Study of War and Society. She would later become a lecturer for the university's history department, where she worked until 2016. 

Commanders Stacy Uttecht and Leslie Mintz were joined by Lieutenant Commanders Paige Blok, Danielle Thiriot and Jennifer Hesling and Lieutenants Amanda Lee, Christy Talisse, Kelly Harris and Emily Rixey for the flyover. 

The pilots flew a formation of five F/A-18 "Super Hornets" over Mariner's burial place at New Loyston Cemetery in Maynardville and landed at TAC Air airport at around 3:30 p.m.

Uttecht, who serves as the commanding officer of Strike Fighter Squadron 32 and is the second woman to command an F/A-18 squadron, said Mariner paved the way for women like her to make their own success in the Navy and join the ranks of its elite fighter pilots. 

ENS Rosemary Conatser (later Mariner) makes pre-flight checks of the main gear of a fleet composite squadron two, VC-2, S-2 tracker antisubmarine aircraft at Naval Air Station Oceana in Virginia Beach.

"This has probably been the coolest thing that I've done in my 19-year career that I've had in the Navy," Uttecht said. "Getting to fly awesome aircraft in and of itself is pretty cool, but then to be able to honor someone who really blazed the way for folks like me to be able to fly these jets, go fly combat missions and be the commanding officer of a squadron — it's almost indescribable." 

"Capt. Mariner flew in a very different Navy," Uttecht said. "It was many years ago, and she fought really hard in the 1990s to make sure that women could fly in combat."

The pilots each wore a decal reading "Sabre," which was Mariner's radio call sign, in the captain's honor. 

Rixey, who graduated from the Navy's TOPGUN school and now serves as a striker fighter tactics instructor, said the experience was truly humbling and that Mariner's legacy cleared the way for her and other female fighter pilots to serve today.

"It's super humbling," Rixey said. "If it weren't for Capt. Mariner and her contemporaries, the original six that paved the way for us, we wouldn't have been able to do what we did today in her honor."

"When it all comes together, a lot of planning goes behind the scenes and hard work from all the members of the flight, so to see it come together in an awesome way to pay tribute to her, to be honest, when Dash 3 pulled up, it gave me chills," she added.

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