There was a small group of us that had gone on weekend trips together, celebrated birthdays together. People who had been my friends at basic were no longer my friends. “It sucked,” she says, of arriving at flight school. She was given a lateral transfer and arrived in Pensacola. She read about it in the newspaper, and holding the article in her hand, called Marine headquarters, and said “This is what I want to do.” After a short pause, she continues: “I can’t imagine what that Colonel must have thought about a little second lieutenant calling up and telling him she’d read something in the newspaper.” “I was halfway through aircraft controller school when Les Aspin lifted the flight restrictions on women,” Deal remembers. It didn’t take long for her to sign up, even though in 1992, though women had flown for the Navy two decades earlier, the Marines still weren’t permitting women in the cockpit.ĭeal completed the Marine basic camp at Quantico, requested aviation maintenance and was assigned to aircraft control school.ĭeal and friend Karen Fine Brasch, naval aviator on board the U.S.S. “I was hanging out at the airfield and ran into the Marine recruiters there,” she says. “He was a Marine in the 50s when they still made trainees to pushups and pullups until they threw up,” Burrow laughs. He thought it was too rough, too dangerous. The daughter of a Marine, Deal only looked briefly at the Army, but her parents convinced her brother’s girlfriend to talk her out of it.
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She earned her pilot’s license for single and multi-engine commercial flight while in college at Kent State in Ohio, and competed on the precision flight team there. “We had an annual drive your tractor to school day,” she remembers with a laugh. She did 4-H for ten years and was heavily involved in her church youth group. After growing up in a town of 1,000 outside of Toledo, Ohio, Deal grew up running cross country and track and playing basketball, raising a pig a year (one that she had to catch at a greased pig contest), and working on a dairy farm.
Sarah Deal Burrow joined the Marine Corps knowing she couldn’t fly.
The bonuses will be paid out to skilled aviators trained on at least one of the Corps' main aviation platforms, including the F-35 Lightning, AV-8 Harrier, and F/A-18 fighter jets MV-22 Osprey, AH-1 Cobra, CH-53 Sea Stallion, and UH-1 "Huey" helicopters and KC-130 aircraft, which is mainly used for aerial refueling.įixed-wing pilots seem to be in the highest demand: Flyers in those categories with less than 12 years of service can get $210,000 if they sign up for an additional six years of service, or receive $100,000 for an additional four.The first female aviator in the USMC shares her secrets about grit David Ottignon, deputy commandant for manpower and reserve affairs, the Corps said its aviation bonus program provides "a proactive, short-term incentive for aviation officers in certain grades and communities with current or forecasted inventory shortfalls." In a message released on Wednesday by Lt. The Marine Corps will pay some of its pilots retention bonuses of nearly a quarter-million dollars in order to address "shortfalls" in the service's aviation community.