Wings of Gold: The Story of the First Women Naval Aviators -- Recruited into Navy flight training as an experiment in 1973, six courageous women overcame resentment and skepticism to prove to the military and the nation that women have what it takes to fly for their country. From the fight for the Equal Rights Amendment and the Tailhook scandal to the Iraq War and the battle to overturn the ban on women in combat, the original female naval aviators bore witness to history -- and made history of their own. They would become the first woman to solo a Navy aircraft, the first to fly a fighter jet, the first to command an aviation squadron, the first female Hurricane Hunter, the first military pilot mom, plaintiff in a federal class-action lawsuit challenging limits on women's ability to serve and, tragically, the first to die in the performance of her duties. This year, the Navy is marking the 50th anniversary of that experiment with events celebrating a half-century of women in naval aviation, including an all-women flyover at the Super Bowl. This year also marks the debut of the first woman demonstration pilot to fly with the Blue Angels -- Lt. Amanda Lee, an F-18 pilot who coincidentally plays a part in the Wings of Gold story and appears on the back cover of the book. The original Top Gun explained that only the "best men" were accepted. Last year's sequel said only the "best men and women" get to go. But women weren't just handed that opportunity -- they had to fight for it. Wings of Gold tells how they got there. Beverly Weintraub is a Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist and instrument-rated private pilot. As an editorial writer for the Daily News, she covered topics including education, social services and aviation, and she shared the 2007 Pulitzer for Editorial Writing for an in-depth investigation into the illnesses afflicting World Trade Center rescue and recovery workers after 9/11. Her op-eds about women and aviation have appeared in the Washington Post and Daily News. Bev holds tailwheel, complex and high-performance airplane endorsements and has crisscrossed the country in single-engine propeller aircraft.
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