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"  It was Christmas day when helicopter pilot Lt. Ashley P. flew her first flight across the desert in Afghanistan for the U.S. Army. She was 25, and had just deployed abroad in active service. At the command of the hulking Black Hawk, she remembered the noise: Simultaneous messages from radio transmissions blending with the voices of her crew, and the buzzing thrum of the chopper blades as she navigated above the foreign landscape. After four years at West Point, followed by the rigors of flight school, finally rising in the sky to pilot a 14 million dollar machine felt like the culmination of her career. Just 10 percent of Army aviation pilots are women and Ashley is part of this elite minority. Her gender may also make her one of the safest flyers in the military. According to a recent report published in TIME, only three percent of all accidents that have occurred since the beginning of the War on Terror in 2002 were caused by women. So what, if anything, make women better flyers than men? And, if there is an innate advantage to being a woman, why are there so few women at the command of our military aircrafts? &amp;quot;I haven&amp;#039;t seen anything that separates the male pilots from the female pilots,&amp;quot; said Captain Tessa G*, a 27-year-old army helicopter pilot who flies Apaches. &amp;quot;In my entire experience in aviation, it hasn&amp;#039;t been about are you a man or a woman, it is, are you professional and how did you show up to do your job?&amp;quot; Related: When Women Fight For Progress She laughed when I told her female pilots are statistically safer flyers than men. She thought her male counterparts would get a kick out of the TIME statistic too. Instead, Tessa believes that being a practical and concise thinker makes her good at her job, able to deal with stress through pragmatism: &amp;quot;I go down a list and say, what do I need to do next?&amp;quot; Studies have shown that this kind of thought process tends to be more attuned in women. A 2013 study published by BMC Journal of Psychology found that men were eight percent slower than women when switching between multiple tasks \u2014 a necessary skill when flying a plane and reacting to the unexpected situations that might cause an accident. &amp;quot;Women have a better ability to be delicate and have a more graceful control touch,&amp;quot; said Stephanie H., a Kiowa helicopter pilot stationed in Georgia. A &amp;quot;light touch&amp;quot; is essential to flying and gives women an intuitive advantage, while men have a tendency to &amp;quot;manhandle&amp;quot; an aircraft. Throughout her career, Stephanie has always been the only female pilot in her unit.  Stephanie, Tessa, and Ashley all agreed that choosing to specialize in aviation had more to do with identifying with a group of people who were highly competitive, composed, type-A personalities \u2014 the overwhelming qualities found in most aviators \u2014 than having female peers and mentors. &amp;quot;I am a firm believer you can have mentors that are men and women, it doesn&amp;#039;t really matter,&amp;quot; said Stephanie, whose first mentor was a male aviation officer. During her junior year he took her class to Fort Rutgers in Alabama, the primary aviation training facility for the Army, and after that she was hooked. &amp;quot;I was really fascinated that there was such an intensive sense of teamwork and camaraderie,&amp;quot; said Tessa of the aviators she met when deciding which specialty to choose after college. &amp;quot;They were absolutely enthralled in the job that they were doing. And, how often are you given the chance to go learn to \uFB02y helicopters for a living?&amp;quot; Related: U.S. Senate Approves the Military Sexual Assault Bill Tessa hopes to work in aviation as long as she has the opportunity, moving into commercial aviation after her service in the military. She believes the limited number of women in aviation merely mirrors the overall makeup of the Army: Out of 1.4 million active soldiers, 14.5 percent are women. However, this doesn&amp;#039;t explain the low percentage of women who pursue careers as pilots in America as a whole. Women make up just five percent of commercial airline pilots, while almost 74 percent of flight attendants are female. In a recent article for the Washington Post, marine Sage Santangelo suggested that how women are trained to serve in the military may lead to inequalities in the positions they qualify for. Only one woman has passed the Marine Infantry Officer Course since it became available to women in 2012; Santangelo is among the women who failed. &amp;quot;Women aren&amp;#039;t encouraged to establish the same mental toughness as men \u2014 rather, they&amp;#039;re told that they can&amp;#039;t compete. Men, meanwhile, are encouraged to perceive women as weak,&amp;quot; she wrote. Physical standards are set higher for men: Women are told to aspire to a 21-minute three mile run while men aim to do the same distance in 18 minutes. Santangelo believes these leniencies don&amp;#039;t allow women to compete on an equal footing with men because they are never trained to push for the same goals \u2014 not because they would be unable to run as fast or lift as much. Training is also segregated by sex and men and women are not encouraged to compete with one another. Additionally, women are only allowed to take the exam once, while men are allowed to take it again if they fail. Santangelo calls this a &amp;quot;physical double standard.&amp;quot; &amp;quot;It&amp;#039;s frustrating to me that there are still doubts about whether women are capable of handling combat environments. The women who have been awarded for their valor in combat, and the women who have died in combat for their country, have already answered the question about capability,&amp;quot; Santangelo wrote. Women have a long history of appealing for equal treatment in the military. In 1974 Sally Woolfolk made history when she became the first female pilot to fly for the Army (with the exception of the service of the WASPs during the Second World War). Since then, women have pushed to have increasingly active roles in aviation, and in 1993, they gained the right to train as fighter pilots. For the last 20 years women have commanded helicopters often equipped with rockets and cannons, or flown low scout planes into dangerous combat zones to do reconnaissance or retrieve ground soldiers. Acknowledging that women are able to take on these high-risk jobs factored into Defense Secretary Leon Panetta&amp;#039;s decision to rescind a nine-year ban on women in combat last January. With over 800 women injured and 130 killed in service in Iraq and Afghanistan, the decision intends to eliminate gender discrimination and bring women on to more equal footing in job security, pay, and career advancement. Panetta gave the military until 2016 to fully open combat positions to women, but as Santangelo points out, the military still has a lot of ground to cover if they hope to properly prepare women for all combat positions in the next two years.  &amp;quot;It is a cultural shift that the Army is going through,&amp;quot; Ashley said. &amp;quot;Especially as there are very few jobs women can&amp;#039;t do now. There isn&amp;#039;t a feeling that you have to break through. It&amp;#039;s already happened.&amp;quot; As an platoon leader for an assault company at the Savannah Deerfield Army Airfield, Ashley was in charge of five Black Hawk helicopters \u2014 the army aircrafts used to place soldiers in combat zones \u2014 and 25 soldiers. Now she is in captain crew training and hopes to become the commander for an entire company. The only (minor) gender discrimination that Ashley and her husband, a civilian, have experienced is with the Family Readiness Group (FRG). The captain&amp;#039;s spouse usually runs the FRG, but because the group has conventionally been focused on supporting female spouses and childrearing, a woman will likely be chosen over Ashley&amp;#039;s husband to lead the FRG when she takes command of her new platoon. Family planning is an unequivocal inequality between male and female pilots. Women are not allowed to fly while pregnant, so many young aviators must choose if and when to have a family to avoid interrupting their career path. While Stephanie and Ashley are both married, neither are interested in having children in the foreseeable future, which has allowed them to rise to leadership positions within their units.  &amp;quot;I don&amp;#039;t think there needs to be an advertising campaign towards [female aviators],&amp;quot; said Ashley. &amp;quot;It is definitely accessible right now to any woman who has the capability and the drive to go for it.&amp;quot; As gender discrimination fades for modern aviators, and the Army evolves to reflect more equal numbers of male and female soldiers, it is likely that the percentage of women at the command of helicopters will also increase. Or it may remain the same. The challenges that draw women like Stephanie and Ashley to aviation are also the demands that make their jobs the focal points of their lives. While many women in America strive to find a &amp;quot;work-life&amp;quot; balance, raising children and moving up the corporate ladder, for women in aviation, this kind of flexibility isn&amp;#039;t available. Rather than policy, biology, and the choices made around it, may ultimately be the most pressing obstacle keeping more women from going into aviation or combat. Related: A Book To Deconstruct the Work Life Balance Each morning an aviator wakes up at 5:30 am to work out with her team. After she showers and eats, she dons an unstructured camouflage flight-suit and pulls her hair into a slicked back bun. From 9 am to 5 pm she tracks flight schedules, conducts maintenance on the machines, and, if she is flying, can spend 8 hours navigating a new flight path with her crew to train for the next deployment. If she flies, she will return home near midnight, leaving just five hours to sleep, or see her family, before beginning her day again. As the roles of women in service expand, the military may have to rethink how they support the women who are soldiers in combat, who are leaders, and who are mothers. The same standards developed to support men at arms should apply. *Name has been changed Photo credit: Getty Images Via ELLE "^^<http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema#string>
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