She’s a rare bird who fell in love with flying from the first day she kissed the sky.
“I didn’t know that I could be a pilot until I was in college in flight training because it was never encouraged,” Brenda Robinson told Channel 9′s Ken Lemon.
Robinson made history in the air as the first Black female pilot in the Navy. She says it all started when she visited an air traffic control tower when she was 16.
“In a New York minute I knew that this was what I was going to do for the rest of my life,” she remembered, adding that she never thought she could actually fly for a living.
She said that in the 1970s, women, especially Black women, had almost no frame of reference for flying a plane.
Still, she went to an aeronautics college and got her pilot’s license. She thought it was over after that.
The Navy had a different plan. They called Robinson, recruiting her into a pilot’s program with spots for 10 women.
At that point, she realized she was going to be the first Black woman in history to go into the Navy. In her 13-year career with the Navy, she flew through oil field fires during the war in Iraq and landed on every aircraft carrier on the East Coast. She delivered people, mail and much-needed supplies to troops on the ground.