Leather flight jackets are back in the news, thanks to the Chief of Naval Operations' recent decision to lift a 1978 ban and return them to the Navy supply system. Now that naval aviators are once again being issued the jackets, we should take things a step further— and allow Navy and Marine Corps fliers to wear them fearlessly.
As it is now, naval aviators are frowned upon if they wear their dark brown leather jackets with the dyed-in-the-wool collars anywhere but on a flight line. If a Marine sentry sees you wearing a flight jacket while driving through the Naval Air Station gate, you can get in a lot of trouble. Some Navy bases fine Navy fliers up to $200.00 for displaying such pride in their warfare specialty!
Is it a matter of pride? Yes. Here's an example. A Navy pilot is driving to work one brisk morning, wearing his flight jacket secretly. It's not because he likes to flout base regulations, it's because he loves his flight jacket that much. Approaching the gate, his car swerves, perhaps almost imperceptibly, while he shrugs off his pride and wriggles it down his shoulders so that the Marine sentry won't catch him.
Stand in front of any gate and you'll see this phenomenon: Hondas, Fords, and Buicks alike all swerve during the final 200 yards while nervous pilots do a Houdini act to get out of their jackets and then drive shamefully through the gate.
For traffic safety alone, we should let aviators wear the jackets!
Here's another example of a Navy flier having to be ashamed that he's proud. In the officer's club, a commander is eating a Dagwood sandwich with a lieutenant commander and two lieutenants.
Suddenly, a waitress appears and embarrasses the whole table by attacking the commander like an Apache for bringing his flight jacket into the dining room. The commander stammers out an apology and takes the offending jacket out to the parking lot and places it in his car before finishing his meal. (True story.)
It's too bad.
I think the Navy is missing out on a great thing. If flight jackets make aviators proud, why not take advantage of that fact in recruiting and public relations? As a leadership incentive? Flight jackets have a tremendous iconic value as visual trademarks—everyone mentally connects them with aviators. If we're trying to build a Navy with spirit and identity, the last thing we should be doing is stripping the recognition from our aviators. If there's a chance to increase community pride, tradition, and self-esteem, why waste it?
It's a concatenation of petty things like this, not just the pay, that's causing the Navy to lose a lot of proud, experienced fliers.
Whose policy was it to blacklist flight jackets, anyway? No one seems to remember anymore! No one can recall just exactly why the jackets upset somebody so much, we just know that they became offensive back in the early 1970s. Word has it that, way back when, the "higherups" in the nonaviation Navy complained that only naval aviators had developed an identifiable swashbuckling, hell-for-leather community vestige. So instead of encouraging the nonaviation folks to come up with their own visual trademarks (it would have been an easy and popular measure), "somebody" up there put the problem to sleep by burning down an icon of naval aviation.
Who am I to be saying this? I've always been told that I'm the kind of person the Navy's supposed to be worried about retaining. I'm 28 years old, a pilot, a lieutenant, and a Naval Academy graduate. Is it important for me to wear my flight jacket into the commissary when I'm rushing between flights at noon to buy two cans of Blue Lake green beans? Yes. When I go home on leave and talk about flying with my friends and relatives? Yes. When I'm walking in a shopping mall? Yes, even there, without fear of punishment. Why not? The jacket is symbolic of my great profession, and the constellation of overseas patches serves as a walking advertisement for naval aviation, and for a thrilling and adventurous life.
I think the time is ripe—right now—to restore flight jackets to their former glory. I'll bet if President Reagan were told that Navy fliers aren't allowed to wear their flight jackets outside the gate, he'd be incredulous.
After all, he knows the value of good public relations—if I'm not mistaken, he's worn quite a few flight jackets m his time. Remember him in "Hellcats of the Navy?"
We need to inject as much zest and color and public rapport as we can m an era that's trying so hard to recapture the kind of sympathetic spirit that existed on, say, VJ Day, when sailors and nurses swooned and laughed and cried, and people took them home to dinner, and it meant something culturally to be part of the U. S. Navy.
Back in those halcyon days, and even on into the late 1960s, aviators could wear their flight jackets outside the gate, at least when driving home from work. Before I conclude, I'd like to emphasize that I strongly support recent efforts to standardize Navy uniforms . . . but this flight jacket business is something different, something unique. The jackets are a bona fide exception to the rules because of their symbolic and public relations value.
Not only that, naval aviators need as much community pride as possible to keep from disintegrating into specialized subsets like "jet jockeys," "rotor heads," "VP drivers," et al.
Without symbols like flight jackets to hold our community pride together, all we'd have in common would be mishap statistics.