Women in the United States Air Force

[7] Other women carried out support roles at rear-echelon bases in Japan, as air traffic controllers, weather observers, radar operators, and photo interpreters.

[7] According to scholars, since at least as early as 1960, Executive Order 10450 was applied to ban transgender individuals from serving in the United States military.

This policy reasoned transgender people were medically unqualified to serve because their mental state was considered unfit.

[7] Frontiero v. Richardson, 411 U.S. 677 (1973), was a landmark Supreme Court case[15] which decided that benefits given by the military to the family of service members cannot be given out differently because of sex.

[16] Air Force Lieutenant Sharron Frontiero and her husband Joseph, a veteran and full-time student, were the plaintiffs.

[7][18][19] Also in 1986, six Air Force women served as pilots, copilots, and boom operators on the KC-135 and KC-10 tankers that refueled FB-111s during the raid on Libya.

"[35] Kelly Flinn, sometimes referred to as Kelly Flynn, was the first female B-52 pilot in the Air Force,[36] but was discharged from the Air Force in 1997 after an adulterous affair with the husband of an enlisted subordinate, for military offenses including disobeying a direct order from her commanding officer to break off the affair, and for lying to him about having done so.

[37] Flinn's trouble with the Air Force received widespread media attention at the time and was discussed in a Senate hearing on May 22, 1997.

[1] Before that, there had been women general officers of a lesser rank in the Air Force, including, among others, an African American female physician, Edith Peterson Mitchell, MD, a medical oncologist who became a brigadier general and president of an American medical society.

[46] In 2013 Defense Secretary Leon Panetta removed the military's ban on women serving in combat, overturning the 1994 rule.

Panetta's decision gave the military services until January 2016 to seek special exceptions if they believed any positions must remain closed to women.

[47][48] In December 2015, Defense Secretary Ash Carter stated that starting in 2016 all combat jobs would open to women.