When Capt. Tammie Jo Shults of Southwest Airlines made her emergency landing of a Boeing 737 on April 17 after an engine explosion and traumatic injuries in the cabin, the world took note of the previous history she made as one of the first women to serve as a fighter pilot in the Navy. Shults, 56, who had wanted to fly since she was a teenager, first tried to enlist in the Air Force and was turned down. She was instead commissioned into the Navy in 1985 and served first as an instructor pilot for the T-2 Buckeye, a training aircraft for student aviators, and then flew as an A-7 Corsair pilot. When her squadron transitioned to the F/A-18 Hornet, then the Navy’s newest fighter jet, Shults was one of the first women to pilot it. But because she was a woman, Shults was prevented from joining a combat squadron, and so she transferred to the Reserve in 1993. Shults then started working for Southwest Airlines as a commercial pilot. Two days after Shults left active duty, the Navy asked the Clinton administration to allow women to fly in combat assignments.

Shults is one of a small sisterhood: the women who have served as military aviators. Even though restrictions on women flying aircraft in combat were lifted 25 years ago, the percentage of military pilots who are women remains around 6.5 percent — and is comparable in the commercial industry, where many pilots land after training and careers in the armed services. In the wake of Shults’s moment in the news, other pioneering women in military aviation considered what it meant to be among the few in a field still dominated by men, why the gender balance has remained so stubbornly lopsided and whether the armed services have done enough to make the history and the roles of these women publicly known.