“I would say, you know, the sky’s the limit, quite literally, the sky is the limit. Just because someone of your gender or your race or your economic background, or your sexual orientation hasn’t done it doesn’t mean that the door is closed, it just means that you got to be ready to kick it down.” -Major Katie Higgins Cook
Major Higgins Cook is a third-generation military aviator. Her grandfather served during World War II, Korea, and Vietnam, and her father was an F-18 fighter pilot in the Navy. After graduating from the US Naval Academy in 2008, she joined the Marine Corps while following in her family’s footsteps.
Higgins Cook was one of very few women Marine pilots to fly combat missions in Afghanistan during Operation Enduring Freedom. Following that, she was assigned to Uganda to support contingency operations in Africa. It was during this deployment when she received an unexpected call from a member of the Blue Angels, inviting her to apply for the elite aviation demonstration team. At that time, Higgins Cook was still a junior captain, but she decided to accept the challenge.
Major Higgins Cook doesn’t take all the credit for breaking barriers. According to a 2018 interview, she claimed that amazing women like the WAVES of WWII, LtCol Sarah Deal Burrow (the first USMC Pilot), and the countless other women in support roles on the Blue Angels team helped carve a path for her. According to Cook, when she was in the cockpit, she wasn’t the ‘Lady Blue Angel’. Instead, she was just another pilot. And she could fly planes just as well as her teammates did.
After two years of flying with the Blue Angels, Major Higgins Cook then served as the Airfield Operations Company Commander, MWSS-271, EAF Bogue, NC.
“The phrase that I tell everybody, when they asked, ‘How did you become a Blue Angel?’ Or ‘What do you recommend to people who want to become a Blue Angel?’ and I always say, ‘Calm seas don’t make a skilled sailor.’ And what I mean by that is, it’s not the easy times in your life, it’s not the smooth seas that shape you as a person. It’s those rough seas, it’s those obstacles, it’s those failures, it’s those hard times, and how you deal with those setbacks that shape you as a person.”
Major Katie Higgins Cook is pictured here as a Captain.
Sources:
‘The sky is the limit,’ says first female Blue Angels pilot
https://www.boldbusiness.com/human-achievement/katie-higgins-cook-first-blue-angels-pilot/
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