First Female Blue Angel Comes Home to Entertain Family, Midshipmen

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A hometown girl who has already made history as the first woman pilot in the Navy’s Blue Angels aerial demonstration squad experienced a personal thrill this week zooming across the skies over Annapolis.

Marine Capt. Katie Higgins of Severna Park – and a Naval Academy graduate – took part in Wednesday’s air show over the city and Friday’s fly-over during academy graduation ceremonies.

She flies a C-130 known as Fat Albert for the Blue Angels.

“It’s beyond words, you know, being able to come back and perform for the midshipmen, to perform for my parents, to perform for my family that is going to be there it’s definitely a surreal experience,” she told WJLA TV.

The Blue Angels are known for their gravity-defying, hair-raising moves – sometimes flying less than two feet apart. But the 10-member team – the best of the best -- was a men-only bastion in a changing military.

Until Higgins became the first woman member of the Blue Angels in September 2014, reports Flying magazine.

“I saw the Blue Angels fly when I was a young kid,” Higgins told CBS News in April. “I was definitely inspired by that.”

Higgins’ father and grandfather were military aviators, but she is the first female pilot in the 69-year history of the Blue Angels.

“I think by including a lady on the team, that just shows little girls and guys that women can do whatever they put their mind to,” Higgins told CBS. “Little girls have told me that they didn’t even know that ladies could fly aircraft, that women could be in the cockpit.”

Higgins’ ground-breaking move came just a few months after Capt. Greg McWherter, the former commanding officer of the Blue Angels -- who went by the pilot call sign “Stiffy” – left the squad while following charges of sexual misconduct, the magazine reports. A Navy review found that the Blue Angels team didn’t discriminate based on gender.

Capt. Tom Frosch, the commander of the Blue Angels, said, a woman can fly any aircraft. The absence of a woman pilot before Higgins joined the team wasn’t deliberate, Frosch told CBS, it was just a matter of finding the right person who blended with the unit.

Higgins, of Severna Park, graduated from the Naval Academy in 2008 and Georgetown University.
She has flown almost 400 combat hours in support of numerous operations and exercises in Afghanistan, Djibouti, France, Greece, South Sudan, Spain, and Uganda.

Watch the YouTube video from Wednesday’s Annapolis Air Show, dedicated to academy sophomore Justin Zemser, who was killed earlier this month in an Amtrak train crash.

»Capt. Katie Higgins, courtesy of Blue Angels website

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