AVIATORS
In 1981, Captain Carmen Lucci appeared to have an unlimited future in the U.S. Air Force. The Ohio native had earned a full scholarship as Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute’s first female AFROTC cadet, and in 1975 she had received her Air Force commission as a distinguished graduate. Her next stop was the University of Tennessee Space Institute, where she earned a master’s degree in aeronautical engineering. In 1977, she entered Air Force active duty.
Lucci had her sights set on being an astronaut, so during her first assignment at Los Angeles Air Force Station, she applied to attend pilot training and the flight test engineering course atwas the fourth woman to attend Air Force TPS; all the others had also been engineers, since the Air Force had just recently begun to train women pilots.
