Word: carrier
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...night was moonless, the kind of darkness that pilots liken to flying into a black hole. On the aircraft carrier U.S.S. Dwight D. Eisenhower, Lieut. John ("Tuba") Gadzinski inched the F-14 Tomcat forward so a deck crewman could hook it to the catapult that would hurl the fighter skyward at 260 km/h. In the Tomcat's backseat, radar-intercept officer Lieut. (j.g.) Kristin ("Rosie") Dryfuse glanced out the cockpit to another deckhand holding a lighted box that flashed "66,000 lbs.," (30 metric tons) the plane's weight. Dryfuse circled her flashlight to signal that the weight was correct...
Tuba powered up the engines and made one last scan of his panel. Tonight they would practice intercept maneuvers over the Adriatic Sea with the carrier's F/A-18 Hornets. Rosie grabbed a bar over her instrument panel and tensed every muscle in her body. Launch...
...combat ship. The results of the experiment have been eagerly awaited. Before the ship even began sea trials last summer, the Navy's macho diehards spread dark warnings that women, ordered on board by the U.S. Congress, wouldn't perform as well as men on the nuclear-powered carrier. Mixing the sexes in cramped quarters for so long, some critics argued, would turn the Ike into a Love Boat. The camaraderie of its male jet jockeys, others declared, would be shattered by having females in cockpits...
...fact, there were some initial rough patches. Before the ship set sail, a female crew member claimed she had been sexually assaulted. After the carrier got under way, 15 women left early because they had become pregnant -- 12 before the cruise began; three during port calls, two of those with their husbands. Two women also complained that they had been sexually harassed. The Navy considered those incidents within the bounds of a successful mission, acknowledging that the integration of the sexes in such close quarters was bound to create new disciplinary dilemmas and awkward situations...
...board of the Citadel believes that women may ruin the morale of the school, the same way that the members of the Navy believed women would ruin the morale on aircraft carriers. But both men and women on the Eisenhower, the first gender-integrated aircraft carrier, praised the experiment and found no problems. Surely, the persons involved in the integration are the most qualified to point out difficulties in morale. If they find no difficulties, then we can place no credence in speculations about such problems...