In a male-dominated field, these female naval mechanics made history in their own right, servicing the aircraft used in the game's first all-female flyover
I know that the chief petty officers and other highly positioned enlisted personnel are for all practical purposes the people who keep a ship functioning but I had never heard of Chief -- even a Command Chief -- taking command of a ship. It was my understanding that only commissioned officers can be in command. They tell the chiefs where the ship is to go and the chiefs make sure it gets there in time and in one piece. And in the unlikely event that the ship is involved in a collision at sea, it is the commissioned officer who takes most of the heat. At least that is what they taught me back in 1969-70 when I was a NROTC midshipman. That was the year that draft "lottery" numbers were assigned and I had made it a point not to know mine. But I was on my 3rd Class Cruise on a destroyer that was using Her Majesty's Royal Dockyard in the Firth of Forth to effect repairs on the 3 boilers which had become inoperable and I was sitting in the "Combat Information Center" (which was shut down) and looking at an old copy of Newsweek where I learned that my draft number was over 300. One of the crew members asked me "So what the "f" are you doing here?". Unable to come up with a good answer over the remainder of my cruise, I resigned my scholarship and went into debt to pay tuition.
I know that the chief petty officers and other highly positioned enlisted personnel are for all practical purposes the people who keep a ship functioning but I had never heard of Chief -- even a Command Chief -- taking command of a ship. It was my understanding that only commissioned officers can be in command. They tell the chiefs where the ship is to go and the chiefs make sure it gets there in time and in one piece. And in the unlikely event that the ship is involved in a collision at sea, it is the commissioned officer who takes most of the heat. At least that is what they taught me back in 1969-70 when I was a NROTC midshipman. That was the year that draft "lottery" numbers were assigned and I had made it a point not to know mine. But I was on my 3rd Class Cruise on a destroyer that was using Her Majesty's Royal Dockyard in the Firth of Forth to effect repairs on the 3 boilers which had become inoperable and I was sitting in the "Combat Information Center" (which was shut down) and looking at an old copy of Newsweek where I learned that my draft number was over 300. One of the crew members asked me "So what the "f" are you doing here?". Unable to come up with a good answer over the remainder of my cruise, I resigned my scholarship and went into debt to pay tuition.