This article first appeared in the War Horse
The invitation to the Padre Island Burger Club in Texas came in while Marine Corps 1st Lt. Allison Bennett was out sailing on a friend's boat. A flight instructor in her naval aviation training squadron texted that he was meeting with a future flight student. He wanted to know if Bennett could swing by to give her some tips.
Bennett had messaged a bit with the Marine instructor, mostly about flying, but she didn't know him well. Personal relationships between flight instructors and flight students are strictly forbidden. But Bennett wanted to pay forward the camaraderie she'd found since she'd started flight training six months earlier, in April of 2020. The sailboat outing was wrapping up, so she asked a fellow flight student to tag along, and the two women headed to the restaurant.
When they arrived, they found the instructor with several friends. He didn't introduce Bennett to any prospective flight students, she later told investigators, and no one seemed interested in talking about flight school. After a few drinks, when Bennett and her friend tried to head out, the instructor offered them a ride home, she said.
Instead, he and his friends took the two women to his house, Bennett says. There, she says, he tried to kiss her, and she pushed him away. The next day, he asked the two women to meet him in a nearby park, where he warned them not to tell anyone what had happened, Bennett and her friend told investigators. His career was on the line, they said he told them. So were their futures as Marine aviators.
The women agreed.
"I didn't know if I would have to fly with him in the future," Bennett later told a board of inquiry. "Being an instructor in my squadron, he kind of controlled my future, my grades, everything." Allison Bennett is a pseudonym -- the officer requested not to use her real name out of fear her comments would lead to retaliation in her military career.
The instructor denied these allegations to investigators.
After the meeting in the park, the instructor kept texting her, asking to meet up, according to text messages reviewed by The War Horse.
After Bennett reported the texts, her command informed her she was suspected of violating military law -- twice. The first time was for inappropriately fraternizing with her instructor. The second time was for inappropriate conduct.
Both times, her military chain of command cleared her of wrongdoing, and ultimately, the officer she accused of harassment was removed from the Marine Corps.
But then the Marine Corps removed Bennett from the flight training program.
Statement after statement from other instructor pilots submitted on her behalf attested to her professionalism and her ability to complete training.
"She is, in all honesty, the hardest working individual I have had the privilege to fly with as an instructor," one instructor wrote. "[S]he is the type of student that I want to instruct; she wants to succeed, is coachable, is humble, and is prepared to work at bettering herself."
Another wrote, "[First] Lt. [Bennett] is the type of aviator I would proudly serve next to in the fleet."
After she was removed from training, Bennett filed the Marine Corps equivalent of an equal employment opportunity complaint. When the report came back, nearly five months later, the Marine Corps and Navy determined that most of her allegations were unsubstantiated. The investigating officer recommended that Bennett be transferred out of aviation to a new specialty within the Marine Corps.
The general who signed off on the findings ignored that recommendation. Instead, he recommended removing Bennett from the Marine Corps altogether.
The naval aviation training program, which takes Navy, Marine, and Coast Guard flight students through ground school and primary flight training up through advanced training on specific aircraft, is vaunted for its highly rigorous training, which has produced generations of extraordinary pilots.
But decades after opening its ranks to women and minorities, naval aviation is still mostly staffed by white men. In interviews and documents reviewed by The War Horse, nearly two dozen current and former flight students and instructors painted the naval aviation training program as an environment that can be toxic for students who don't fit a certain mold. They encounter a spectrum of discrimination -- often by the instructors who grade them -- ranging from biased assumptions to outright targeting. In the Marines, the least diverse of all the military branches, the atmosphere is particularly troubling.
For some trainees, this environment manifests in a cascade of slights in a culture where they don't always feel welcome. Women and students of color in the Marines and Navy say they struggled to find mentors and instructors with whom they could connect, and that they were not given the same chances to recover from errors that their white, male classmates were.
"There's a lot of people that just didn't want to see me be successful," one Black officer, who chose to leave aviation training in 2021, told The War Horse. Like other current and former flight students, he requested to speak anonymously out of fear that his comments would affect his military career.
A female Marine told The War Horse that certain interactions colored her experiences in flight training, with an instructor telling her he couldn't be left alone in a room with her because she was a woman. He wanted to help her study, he said, but shouldn't -- because all the analogies he could offer for the relative position of planes flying in formation were sexual innuendos.
"It's just kind of like a continuum of harm," she says. "It sends the message that we have to work twice as hard to earn half the recognition. And it just signifies to me that this is not an organization I want to remain a part of."
Students reported feeling like they quickly gained reputations for being difficult or unable to succeed -- reputations that followed them, supported by gossip among flight instructors. Some students believed that bias or overt retaliation played a role in their being removed from flight school -- that by speaking up, they were seen as troublemakers -- and that senior officers inappropriately bent policies to "check the boxes" to fail certain students.
"There are protocols and they're written down, but if a [commanding officer] can find a way to manipulate the information, they can make it work out [how they want]," one former instructor tells The War Horse.
The military knows this is a problem. Since the fallout from the Tailhook scandal in 1991, in which Navy and Marine pilots sexually assaulted more than 80 women, including fellow officers, at a naval aviation convention, the military has promised to improve aviation culture for women -- a promise it has also made to pilots of color, who train and fly in a predominantly white profession. And concerns about the training environment for student pilots are not new. In 2020, the Navy's own investigation into a shooting by an international flight student in Navy training the year before found that command climate problems in flight training, in which instructors demeaned certain students and used homophobic and ethnic insults, made the shooting more likely to occur.
But little has changed. The Navy and the Marine Corps, already facing a critical pilot shortfall, have failed to grow the ranks of minority pilots. While the number of female flight students has increased in recent years, women still report bias and harassment -- as do students of color.
"You're either part of the good old boys' club or you aren't," says another officer, who was an instructor pilot from 2018 to 2021. "It was this very archaic, locker-room, toxic, type A-like mentality."
'I'm Going to Serve My Country or Forever Wish I Had'
When Bennett joined the Marine Corps two years before flight school, she was the type of candidate the Marine Corps says it wants: bright, driven, dedicated. She earned an advanced degree before deciding to serve in the military.
"It was just kind of like a call to service that I'd always had, but never acted on," Bennett says. "I was in graduate school and was like, 'Well, it's either now or never. I'm either going to serve my country or I'm going to live my life wishing I had.'"
Despite some early challenges, Bennett was committed to flying. After learning she was prone to severe airsickness, she made it through a brutal airsickness remediation course. Then, on her first solo flight, alone in the cockpit, the plane suffered a full hydraulic failure. Bennett managed to land the plane safely.
"EXCELLENT job handling an actual aircraft malfunction!" her instructor wrote in her grade sheet after the flight.
Not long before she started flight training, Bennett met up with a fellow Marine for coffee. According to unredacted documents provided to The War Horse from a source who was not involved in the investigation, Bennett told investigators the two had matched on Tinder, a dating app. But when they realized that they were both headed to flight training, he as an instructor and she as a flight student, they quickly agreed not to meet up again.
Their relationship stayed professional, and the Marine, Maj. Rowdy Meinen, became her senior Marine -- the officer who oversaw all the Marine flight students in the squadron.
One night, not long after she started flight training, Bennett missed a phone call from Meinen. Shortly after, he texted her a picture of his penis, she told investigators.
Bennett was shocked. She quickly deleted the photo, and Meinen sent a face-palm emoji. The next morning, he texted that he'd had too many drinks, according to text messages reviewed by The War Horse.
Meinen declined, through a Marine Corps spokesperson, to talk with The War Horse.
Bennett decided not to say anything. Meinen had previously been professional, and she wanted to give him the benefit of the doubt. But she also worried about sticking out, she told investigators.
Students told The War Horse that trainees who stuck out in any way -- including by speaking up about issues -- could be seen as problem children.
"People feel pressure to keep their heads down and earn their wings of gold," a former instructor tells The War Horse.
Survey data from some training units supports this idea. In a Marine administrative command overseeing Marine flight students, 90% of respondents in a 2021 command climate survey agreed with the statement, "In my unit, military members/employees who file a sexual harassment complaint would be blamed for causing problems."
Eighty-five percent believed that people who filed such a complaint would be discouraged from moving forward with it.
A 2022 survey of a primary training squadron reported similar numbers.
A Navy pilot tells The War Horse that, after calling out misogyny at her squadron, fellow students called her a "f---ing bitch." "You shouldn't have brought that up," she says they told her. "You'll get everyone in trouble -- good guys too."
"I know people keep saying, 'Oh, it's changing a little,'" a former Marine Corps pilot who was sexually assaulted by a fellow pilot in 2003 told The War Horse. "I don't see it."
It's not only sexual misconduct. Minority flight students say they felt nervous to report what they saw as unfair treatment for fear they would be labeled "difficult." One Black former flight student tells The War Horse he noticed a pattern of certain flight instructors failing him on flights, even though he met stated benchmarks, because they "felt" he wasn't a strong enough flier.
One instructor was no longer scheduled to fly with the student, because of his pattern of giving the student unusually low grades or failing his flights, the former flight student says. But the student's failed flights continued to count against him, and he was removed from flight school just weeks before finishing the program, he says.
"I didn't say anything because I didn't want to [be] blacklisted by my superiors who may now view me as an unprofessional service member and targeted as a troublemaker," the student wrote in an account of his experiences in flight school. "The truth is there are repercussions when one speaks up about unfair treatment or asking for accountability of parties involved."
In August 2020, Bennett failed a flight. A friend from flight school had died just days before in an accident off-base, so her instructor arranged for her to appear before a Human Factors Board -- a common evaluation to assess whether external factors are influencing a pilot's performance.
A Marine major named Alex Smith -- an instructor pilot who outranked Bennett -- served on the board. A few days later, Bennett ran into Smith at a local park, where they talked about her board. The next day, Smith texted Bennett. He offered to help her study for the check flight she would need to get back to piloting solo. Bennett thanked him for his offer but told him she didn't want to impose on his evening, according to messages reviewed by The War Horse.
Through his lawyer, Smith declined to comment on this story.
Several weeks later, Bennett texted Smith a picture of a sailboat, telling him she had finally made it out on a boat. They exchanged a few messages, and then Smith asked her to join him at the Padre Island Burger Club, where he was "briefing up" a prospective flight student, he told her.
Bennett discussed whether she should go with a fellow flight student, and the two decided to go together to ensure it was appropriate, they told investigators.
In the weeks after, the texts kept coming, according to messages reviewed by The War Horse. Smith checked in with Bennett a day later. A few days after that, he invited her out to a bar. Then to his boat. To watch a movie at his place.
"I remember being like, 'Oh hell no. I'm not gonna go meet this guy,'" Bennett says. She was friendly in her responses, but she declined again and again, trying to let him down gently.
But Smith also hinted he planned to take her on a cross-country flight, according to an unredacted investigation provided to The War Horse by a source who was not involved. It would be an overnight training trip with just a few other people, where she'd fly alone with Smith for hours.
In interviews with investigators, Smith denied these allegations. The Marine Corps ultimately determined he had harassed Bennett, according to documents reviewed by The War Horse.
"I felt like I was going to be kind of trapped," Bennett says. "It's like an animal that got snared by something and you want to get away but you can't, and you just have to kind of be calm."
Bennett asked the flight coordinator, a civilian Navy employee, if there was a way to avoid flying a cross-country flight with Smith. Around the same time, Meinen, the senior Marine who Bennett alleged had sent her a picture of his penis, told Bennett he was hearing rumors about something going on between Smith and her, according to the investigation.
Bennett corrected him. She didn't report what happened after Smith asked her to come by the Padre Island Burger Company, but she told him Smith wouldn't stop texting her. It made her uncomfortable, she said, and she didn't want to fly cross-country with him.
"I didn't really know how to report it," Bennett says. "I guess I thought that by telling someone higher in rank, they'll just know what to do with it."
The Defense Department policy on harassment informs commanders and supervisors that upon learning of a sexual harassment complaint, they must inform the victim of official reporting options and procedures, make sure they're aware of support resources, and investigate complaints as appropriate.
Meinen took none of these required actions, according to the investigation. He told Bennett that he was friends with Smith. He'd ask him to stop bothering her, and he would make sure they weren't scheduled for any flights together. But he also threatened her with a nonpunitive letter of caution, saying she needed to stop texting Smith as well, Bennett told investigators.
Then, Bennett told investigators, Meinen told her a story about a female aviator whose call sign referred to an airplane dropping a bomb -- because she was known as a place where male pilots could go to "drop their loads."
In an interview with investigators, Meinen denied telling Bennett this, but confirmed it was a story he had told before.
"The vibe I got," Bennett later told investigators, "is to not get a reputation like [that]."
'There Is No Desire for Change Whatsoever'
Fifty years ago, eight female naval officers entered flight training at Pensacola. A year later, six of them graduated: the first women to earn their naval aviation wings of gold. Twenty years later, in 1993, Sara Deal Burrow became the first female Marine to start flight training, following a policy shift that allowed women to fly combat aircraft.
But half a century after women began flying in the Navy, and 30 years after the first female Marine Corps pilot, the percentage of female aviators in both those services remains low.
The Navy declined to answer questions from The War Horse regarding its percentage of female aviators. But recent media reports put the percentage of female naval aviators between 12% and 15%, compared with just over 20% of the Navy generally.
The Marine Corps also declined to answer questions from The War Horse regarding its percentage of female aviators. Women comprise about 9% of the total Marine Corps -- far lower than the other military branches.
Data obtained from the Navy shows that in 2022, female students made up about 18% of primary flight training students, up from 13% in 2021. The data is not broken down by service branch.
In the fighter jet community, widely seen as the most elite flying force in the military, the ranks of women are minuscule. The Navy's storied Blue Angels accepted its first female fighter jet pilot just last year.
The same is true for pilots of color. Seventy-five years after Jesse Brown became the first Black naval aviator to complete training, the percentage of Black naval aviators is persistently low.
The Navy declined to provide data regarding the rates of non-white naval aviators. According to a Military.com investigation, in 2018 Black aviators made up 1.9% of Navy jet pilots. The Navy's first Black female fighter pilot received her wings just three years ago.
The Marine Corps also declined to provide any data regarding minority pilots to The War Horse. The Military.com investigation found that Black pilots made up less than 1.7% of all Marine Corps pilots in 2018. Data The War Horse obtained from the Navy shows that the overall percentage of Black students in flight training has not significantly shifted in the past five years. In both 2017 and 2022, the percentage of Black students hovered below just 4% of primary flight students -- but between 7% and 8% of those who left primary training.
"There is no desire for change whatsoever," says Col. Ché Bolden, a retired Marine Corps flight officer who conducted a 2021 study for the Marine Corps on systemic barriers facing Black pilots, which was not publicly released. The Marine Corps declined to comment on his statement.
In 2021, there were three jet pilots of color out of 581 in the Marines, Bolden tells The War Horse.
The lack of diversity is an existential threat. The military is struggling to recruit and retain members. Among pilots, the shortage is particularly acute, and technical and safety issues have bottlenecked the Navy's training program, slowing down the minting of new pilots.
"In a fully volunteer force, and in a time when we're having difficulties recruiting, we need to make sure that everyone feels welcome in our military," Rep. Mikie Sherrill, a Democrat from New Jersey and former Navy helicopter pilot, tells The War Horse.
In the Marine Corps, the fighter pilot shortage quadrupled from 6% in 2006 to 24% in 2017. Last year, the Corps authorized signing bonuses of $210,000 for some pilots who agreed to stay on active duty for another six years.
The pressure to find qualified instructor pilots is high. When Bennett met Smith, the flight instructor who sent her inappropriate text messages, they were stationed together in Training Squadron VT-28, one of two primary training squadrons in Corpus Christi, Texas.
But Smith hadn't started out in VT-28. Initially, he had been assigned as an instructor in its sister squadron, VT-27, in a temporary duty status.
But after a series of incidents there -- including calling female flight students names like "sweetheart" and "cupcake," allowing a male flight student to live with him while the student was going through a divorce, and allegations he had been seen drinking with a flight student -- he was removed from the squadron, according to documents reviewed by The War Horse.
The Marine Corps and Naval Air Forces did not respond to questions about Smith's removal from the squadron.
The commanding officer of VT-27 saw Smith's use of nicknames as "a shocking violation of the instructor and student professional relationship," he later told a Marine Corps board of inquiry.
He refused a request from the Marine Corps administrative flight command to reaccept Smith as a flight instructor in a permanent status and relayed concerns about Smith to the command of VT-28, the commanding officer told the board of inquiry.
But squadrons have an extremely high flight tempo and are often short instructor pilots, the commanding officer testified.
"They wanted a flier," he told the board, "so they accepted him."
'I Couldn't Focus on Just Flying'
Smith wasn't the only instructor moved to an instructor position after concerns about inappropriate behavior emerged.
Maj. Kyle Maschner was a flight instructor and the officer in charge of the administrative unit that oversaw Marine flight students. It was an open secret among flight students that he had been removed from the Blue Angels, where he had flown the C-130 "Fat Albert" support plane, after he inappropriately touched a female enlisted sailor, six officers told The War Horse, including two former members of the Blue Angels.
Maschner declined to comment to The War Horse through a Marine Corps spokesperson. The Navy and Marine Corps did not respond to requests for comment about the incident.
When investigators later asked Col. William Hendricks, the commanding officer who oversaw many of the Marines in flight training, his opinion of Maschner's posting to an instructor position, the investigators likened it to putting "the fox in the hen house."
Hendricks said he had little choice. "I try to put the very best person I can in the job," he told them. "I have limited options of who I can put in these positions, so I get who I get."
But he believed Maschner deserved a second chance, he told investigators, noting that the Marine Corps had elected to retain him.
"My conclusion was this is a genuinely good person who made a bad mistake," Hendricks stated.
Hendricks declined to comment to The War Horse through a Marine Corps spokesperson.
Bennett didn't try reporting the harassment by Smith again, she says. But months later, after she had graduated from primary flight training and moved on to her intermediate phase, her primary flight instructor, Robert Zetelski, heard a rumor, according to the investigation. He called Bennett, and she told him about the evening at the Padre Island Burger Company and the texting that followed.
Zetelski immediately informed the squadron's chain of command.
"I was like, 'Hey, I got some information that you need to know about -- like right now,'" he says.
He made a formal report of sexual harassment in accordance with Marine Corps policy, he says. But when the investigating officer spoke with Bennett, he read her Article 31 rights -- the rights given to someone suspected of violating the Uniform Code of Military Justice.
Even though Smith had a history of issues with flight students, Bennett was suspected of fraternization -- socializing with her flight instructor, which is prohibited.
After that, Bennett says, she heard nothing: no further interviews, no update, no notification as to the outcome of the investigation. Zetelski noticed a shift in her.
"Her demeanor changed," he tells The War Horse. Where once she was focused and saw feedback as an opportunity to improve, now even small corrections caused her to panic.
"If she didn't do well in an event, she would call me crying and being like, 'Oh my god, I can't,'" he says.
She struggled emotionally after being told she was under investigation, Bennett says. She felt constantly on edge as she waited for months for any sort of news.
"It was really hard, because I just never knew what was going on, if I was going to be put in jail or the brig, or, like what they were investigating -- was I in trouble? Was I not in trouble?" she says. "What did the other instructors know? Were people judging me? Or did they think I was, like, a hussy or something? It really took away from my ability to just focus on flying."
She failed a flight with an instructor pilot who had been present when she was informed she was suspected of fraternization. By then, Bennett had been cleared -- the investigation had been closed for months. But Bennett had never been informed of the outcome, she says.
Then she failed another flight and, in a panic after she landed, kept asking the instructor if there was anything she could do to fix the flight. She told him she'd do anything to make it through flight school.
Hendricks, the commanding officer, opened an investigation. This time, Bennett was suspected of inappropriate conduct.
In an interview with investigators, the flight instructor who failed her said that asking if there was anything she could do to pass the flight was unprofessional -- a military aviator should expect to adhere to standards. But other officers interviewed, including Hendricks, suggested that they believed Bennett may have been offering something in exchange for a better grade.
"She sexually propositioned two male [instructors]," one flight instructor, who was not in the cockpit during either of Bennett's failed flights, told investigators. "The only saving grace is that she did it to two gentlemen that had the moral fiber to deny that."
'They're Telling Us Only White Men Have Been Good Enough'
In documents and interviews with The War Horse, women and students of color described feeling like some instructors held them to different standards from their peers and said they struggled to connect with the officers grading them.
"Aviation is about performance, but it's also about how much people like you," says Lt. Col. Erin Black, a retired Marine Corps pilot. "Women and nonwhite [people] are already at a disadvantage, because they're women and nonwhite. They don't get the presumption of performance."
One former flight student tells The War Horse that a flight instructor informed her she should append the word "please" to all of her radio communications -- something that contradicts military radio protocols and which none of the men in her squadron were required to do.
A Latino officer characterized flying with a certain instructor as being "hated for no reason." Another student, in an account documenting what he observed between a flight instructor and a Black student, wrote that "the cockpit environment became noticeably hostile," describing the instructor as "aggressive" toward the Black student and unwilling to teach him when he made mistakes.
"Students would say, 'Oh, yeah, that instructor is awesome,'" another Black former flight student said. "And it's like, You're telling me that that instructor is awesome. That instructor asked if I had a brain aneurysm inside the plane."
"Ducks pick ducks," says Bolden, the retired flight officer. "People are comfortable with who looks like them."
The lack of diversity in leadership has real consequences. One female Navy pilot tells The War Horse that she wasn't aware she could request to reschedule a critical evaluated flight two days after she was sexually assaulted in flight school in 2020, in part because there was no one in leadership she felt comfortable speaking with.
"It's not like every male instructor there was breathing down my throat or yelling or anything, but there was just sort of an overall atmosphere that I felt, as a young single woman, that I was just unsafe in general, and I couldn't really put my finger on it at the time," she says. Her squadron had just one female instructor, she says, with whom she had never flown.
Last year, the Coast Guard officer in charge of overseeing Coast Guard flight students, who train alongside Navy and Marine students, was investigated and found to have inappropriately touched two female flight students while intoxicated.
"The Coast Guard takes allegations of inappropriate conduct seriously, thoroughly investigates each case, and holds perpetrators appropriately accountable," a Coast Guard spokesperson told The War Horse. "The Coast Guard promptly investigated the allegations and, after substantiating misconduct, awarded non-judicial punishment and relieved the member from primary duties."
Roderick Stevenson, a Black officer who was removed from flight training last year, told The War Horse that, after being corrected by one flight instructor in the cockpit, the instructor asked him, "Do you want to punch me?"
"I'm an African American male," Stevenson says. "I'm about 5'10", about 210 [pounds]. Not a small guy. That question just sparked so many -- just like, All right, now I know what's going on. They're trying to make me out to be this aggressive man."
He also provided The War Horse with a video of a different white flight instructor confronting him at his home after an altercation between their dogs on private property, in which Stevenson's dog jumped on her dog after Stevenson left his dog unattended in the yard.
The next day, after seeing Stevenson biking with his dog next to him off-leash, the instructor came to his home. In the video, Stevenson offers to pay any vet bills she had incurred the day before. The instructor repeatedly demands his rank and command so she can report him to the military for "not following the rules."
Although the incident had occurred the previous day, in the video the flight instructor calls the police on the Black flight student while she stands on the sidewalk outside his home. Stevenson says the incident terrified his young daughter.
Stevenson says he informed his command after the instructor posted his address on social media and then continued to show up outside his home. Although the police eventually issued the instructor a trespass warning, the flight student felt his command did not take the incidents seriously and did not consider how it affected him to fly with instructors he knew were friendly with her, he says.
Naval Air Forces officials declined to comment to The War Horse about the incident. In response to an inquiry from a senator, the Navy wrote that it completed a "formal inquiry" and found that both officers "had a mutually antagonistic and acrimonious relationship as neighbors."
Instructor pilots are responsible for grading student flights, which plays a role in the type of aircraft students will eventually fly: Only high-scoring students qualify to train on jets.
Marine Corps data obtained by The War Horse for one of the two Marine aviation training units shows that in recent years, 51% of white men scored high enough for jet training. Among white women, that number was 38%. Just 21% of Black men and 14% of Black women qualified for jet training.
Bolden, the retired flight officer, tells The War Horse that while he was studying diversity in Marine Corps aviation, he kept encountering the same idea.
"The recurring theme from everybody we talked to that was not of color or a woman: 'The Marine Corps is a performance-based organization. … [T]he best performers are the ones that advance and excel,'" he says.
"They're sitting there, looking at us and telling us, 'Well -- only white men have been good enough.'"
'I Don't Think Women Belong in the Navy'
The second investigation into Allison Bennett found no evidence that she offered anything in exchange for a better grade. But again, no one told her the outcome of the investigation, she says.
Rather, the week after the investigating officer reported his findings to the command -- stating that Bennett lacked "emotional maturity" and should be formally counseled on appropriate interactions between students and instructors -- Bennett learned that, based on her flight performance, her future in flight training was under review.
Navy policy lays out a clear procedure for evaluating concerns about a student's flying ability: The student flies with the commanding officer, and if they fail that, a Training Review Board determines whether they'll remain in training.
Bennett was not given the opportunity to fly with the commanding officer, nor was she evaluated in a Training Review Board, according to documents reviewed by The War Horse. Instead, the command informed her she would be subject to a Service Level Review Board -- a formal Marine Corps review, reserved for unusual cases.
The Marine Corps did not answer questions about why Bennett was evaluated via a Service Level Review Board.
Soon, Bennett heard about another Service Level Review Board -- one that had happened six months earlier.
First Lt. Hannah Groom joined the Marine Corps late. Before she signed up, she had earned a doctorate in physics, and she dreamed about becoming an astronaut.
"I really wanted to fly," she says. "I was in Young Marines as a child. Deep down, I always wanted to be a Marine."
In officer training and flight school, Groom had earned a reputation as a straight shooter -- somebody who would not sit idly by when she saw things that weren't right.
"She's not a 'yes man,'" a peer from the Marines wrote in a letter of support for Groom. It was a trait that had brought her both derision and praise from her peers in her officer training course, after Groom, a gay woman, called out fellow Marines for using homophobic slurs. In another letter, a fellow Marine specifically noted Groom's "dedication to uphold what is right, even when the right thing is the hardest thing to do."
So when an instructor pilot during Groom's primary flight training told a story in front of her that she says began with the sentence, "You can't trust women pilots," Groom reached out to a female mentor in the Navy for advice.
"I think this needs to be address[ed]," she texted. She wrote that she liked the instructor but she worried other flight students would think it was OK to say similar things, according to messages reviewed by The War Horse. "I don't know if this would affect my grades, I hope it wouldn't but you never know," she wrote.
Groom decided to report the incident to her class adviser, according to an unredacted investigation provided to The War Horse by a source who was not involved in it. Her adviser didn't address the complaint, she told investigators. So Groom went to the next officer in the chain of command.
The instructor pilot disputed the allegations to investigators and said Groom misconstrued a story he told about a particular female pilot. In their investigation, the Navy and Marine Corps did not find fault with the command's handling of the complaint. The squadron commanding officer discussed inappropriate comments with flight instructors, and afterward, the instructor who made the comment called Groom.
But rather than apologizing, she alleges in documents reviewed by The War Horse, he told her she needed to have thicker skin to get through flight school: These types of comments would be common in the aviation community.
The instructor told investigators he did not say this.
Other officers told The War Horse they heard similar comments in flight school. "Women aren't lethal. I don't think they belong in the Navy," one pilot says a fellow student told her in training. She says an instructor also said that "girls have a harder time with trim," or balancing the aircraft. "It's just ergonomics or whatever," he said.
Groom's complaint was never formally documented, as required by Navy policy, and the command equal opportunity officer never contacted her about resolving the complaint, she says.
Several months later, Groom learned she would be evaluated at a Service Level Review Board over concerns about her professionalism. A week and a half earlier, in a formal report, her senior Marine had written she had "an established trend of unprofessional conduct," noting he had counseled her a month earlier for "unkempt appearance, poor attitude, lack of motivation, lack of composure, lack of bearing and disparaging a Senior Officer."
The officer wrote that attitude and professionalism issues were apparent in a review of Groom's training record. But out of nearly 130 flights in flight school, only four instructors had written anything negative about Groom's attitude -- all of them after she reported her concerns about her instructor's comment about not trusting women pilots. More than 20 instructors wrote overtly positive comments about her motivation and attitude.
"[She] is extremely receptive to instruction and learns quickly," one instructor wrote just a week before the report documenting her unprofessionalism. "1st Lt Groom has a fantastic attitude and professionalism."
"I'm not perfect, but I'm not a s---bag," Groom says. "There's definitely, to me, a double standard of what is a woman being assertive, versus a woman being aggressive?"
Groom's board -- which consisted of four officers, including Maschner, the Marine who had been removed from the Blue Angels for misconduct -- voted to retain her in training. The official order from the board informed Groom that staying in training relied on "her ability to maintain professionalism and proper officer conduct."
If she screwed up again, she was out.
Bennett's review board, six months after Groom's, ended differently. The board -- also four officers, including Maschner -- focused on Bennett's performance under stress. Even though the command investigation found that Bennett had not propositioned anyone, a different board member later told investigators in Bennett's equal opportunity investigation that he found Bennett's behavior "very disgusting," stating that, "The Marine Corps absolutely has the right to remove you from training if you are propositioning one of the [instructors] following a flight," according to documents reviewed by The War Horse.
After a brief recess, the board voted to remove her from flight school. She did not receive a clear explanation as to why, and she was not afforded an opportunity to meet with the commanding officer afterward, she said in documents reviewed by The War Horse. Hendricks told investigators he was not informed Bennett had requested to meet with him, although a board member said at the time that Hendricks declined to meet with her.
A few days later, Hendricks officially removed Bennett from training, writing that she was a "below average performer."
'The Squeaky Wheel Gets Ostracized'
In March of last year, the Marine Corps convened a board of inquiry to examine Smith's record. At the end of the proceedings, the Marines separated Smith, according to documents reviewed by The War Horse. But Bennett had already been removed from training.
In an appeal to congressional representatives, another woman recounted a male flight instructor, with his flight suit unzipped past his groin, who told her that her flight suit wasn't zipped high enough. She said he told her she should take out her breasts, while he took out his testicles, and they would have a contest to see who could withstand zipping up their flight suit longer. Other instructors present did nothing, she said.
A pilot who spoke with The War Horse stressed that behaviors like this came from a minority of pilots, but said there was little tolerance for those who pushed back.
"Women and minorities in the military have a fear of repercussions later in their careers, because aviation is based entirely on your reputation," she says. "The squeaky wheel gets the grease, right? Well, it's not frickin' like that here. The squeaky wheel gets ostracized."
These issues are not confined to naval aviation training. An independent review of sexual assault in the military reported in 2021 that "most" of the survivors it interviewed regretted reporting their assaults, with women reporting that, among other things, they were often ostracized by their leaders and peers.
Another study found that nearly a third of service members experienced retaliation after reporting sexual assault.
"I think that it just continues to discourage people from reporting," says Black, the retired Marine Corps pilot. "They know it's gonna be a s--- show. And they likely know it could end their career."
After Groom's review board, she was concerned that women's experiences in flight school weren't taken seriously. She'd heard of other flight students who had been subject to sexist comments and flight students who had been sexually assaulted. Then she heard Bennett's story.
"Hearing everything that she went through … infuriated me," Groom says.
In November of 2021, not long after Bennett was removed from flight training, Groom failed a flight. Her command scheduled a Human Factors Board.
In a conversation with a Navy officer who would sit on the board, Groom vented her frustration. The Navy officer was a uniformed victim advocate -- a military member who provides information and support for victims of sexual assault. Groom told the officer about Meinen, the senior Marine who Bennett alleged sent her an unsolicited picture of his penis, and she mused about speaking to the press about the problems she was seeing, according to documents reviewed by The War Horse.
Groom believed their conversation was confidential. But the officer briefed their meeting up the chain of command. And although an unsolicited picture of genitals constitutes sexual harassment, the officer did not act upon the claim, later saying she thought it had already been handled.
A few days later, the commanding officer of Groom's training squadron formally counseled her that her comment about speaking out could be perceived as a threat against the command. The next week, she was removed from flight school. And a week and a half after that, she was read her Article 31 rights for violating the Uniform Code of Military Justice.
She, too, was under investigation.
Groom was not accused of any specific violations of the Uniform Code of Military Justice. Rather, the memo initiating the investigation, signed by Hendricks, directed the investigator to look into any instances of potential "substandard performance of duty."
"If there had been substandard performance, and there had been documentation thereof, they wouldn't have to do an investigation," Black says.
After their removal from flight training, Groom and Bennett filed Prohibited Activities and Conduct complaints, the Marine Corps equivalent of an equal employment opportunity complaint, in January 2022, alleging that they experienced harassment and bullying in flight training. Bennett also alleged she had been sexually harassed. According to Marine Corps policy, an investigation must begin within three duty days of a commander accepting a complaint.
But the Marine Corps did not appoint an investigating officer while the command investigation into Groom continued, according to documents provided to The War Horse from a source who was not involved.
During that investigation, the investigating officer interviewed just three witnesses, two of whom Groom had named in her equal opportunity complaint. He failed to interview any of the more than 20 instructors who had written positive comments about her attitude and motivation during flight training.
In March, the head of the Marine Corps' training command signed off on the investigation into Groom, which found a trend of unprofessionalism and recommended she no longer serve as an officer. Groom says she was not informed of the outcome.
The same day -- a full two months after the women filed their equal opportunity complaints -- he appointed investigating officers to look into the complaints.
It was another three months before the women got word back. When the joint Navy-Marine Corps investigation was finally completed in July 2022, it had combined the women's complaints -- although they had filed separately -- and found that their allegations were unsubstantiated. It did note that Smith's harassment of Bennett had previously been substantiated.
The equal opportunity investigation included interviews where the investigating officers asked witnesses about any "rumors" or "unfavorable impressions" of Groom. It also determined there was no reason to investigate whether Meinen had sent Bennett a picture of his penis. He denied it to investigators, and while one of the investigators noted in his interview notes that Meinen was sweating and nervous during the questioning, the investigators wrote that "both officers have a motive to misrepresent this matter and the credibility of both officers is at least suspect."
The Marine Corps declined to respond to questions about the incident. Months later, the military eventually did investigate it, according to officers familiar with the case.
"I was a federal prosecutor and I directed FBI investigations," Sherrill, the congresswoman, tells The War Horse. "But you don't have to be that to look at this investigation. I mean, you could read a Nancy Drew novel with this investigation. It was not hard to see [that it was poorly done]," she said of the equal opportunity complaint investigation.
The investigating officers, referencing the command investigation into Groom throughout, recommended she be removed from the Marine Corps. Bennett, they said, should be reassigned to another specialty.
But Lt. Gen. Kevin Iiams, the head of the Marine training and education command, disagreed.
Iiams declined to speak with The War Horse through a Marine Corps spokesperson.
As a result of the investigation into their equal opportunity complaints, he determined, both women should be separated from the Marine Corps.
Their performance of duty had been substandard.
'Sexual Harassment's a Crime. Period.'
For months, Bennett and Groom waited, expecting to be removed from the Marine Corps any day.
Then, this past April, in a congressional budget hearing, Rep. Sherrill asked Navy Secretary Carlos Del Toro and other senior Navy and Marine Corps leaders about the two women.
"The stories I'm now hearing out of Pensacola" -- where pilots start their training -- "could just as easily have been stories coming out of the Tailhook conference in Vegas," Sherrill told Navy Secretary Carlos Del Toro and other senior Navy and Marine Corps leaders.
Just days after the hearing, Bennett and Groom received a memo from the commandant of the Marine Corps. After months in administrative limbo, the two women learned that they were being reinstated in flight training. All the materials related to their removal would be wiped from their records. There was no explanation.
Both women said they were told they needed to decide in fewer than 48 hours whether they wanted to resume training.
The Marine Corps did not answer a detailed list of questions about the women's experiences. A statement from Maj. James Stenger, a Marine Corps spokesperson, to The War Horse said, "All matters surrounding the two Marine flight students were processed and resolved at the administrative level. The Marine Corps fully supports the Marines in their return to training."
In June, Sen. Kristen Gillibrand, a Democrat from New York, raised Bennett and Groom's experiences during a confirmation hearing for Gen. Eric Smith, now the acting commandant of the Marine Corps. She asked what the Marine Corps had learned about how to handle sexual harassment and retaliation claims going forward.
Smith did not point to specific lessons but told Sen. Gillibrand, "Sexual harassment, sexual assault's a crime. Period. All-stop." He said he was committed to making sure "that the standard which they should expect is that anyone who shows up to flight training, regardless of who they are, receives the exact same syllabus and the same opportunities to earn their wings of gold."
The War Horse asked the Marine Corps multiple times how it was supporting women and minority aviators, as well as about any efforts it had to diversify its pilot corps. The Marine Corps did not comment.
Naval Air Forces officials also did not respond to a list of questions about Groom and Bennett's experiences nor answer questions about its efforts to support diversity in naval aviation.
Publicly, Naval Air Forces has highlighted diverse aviators on its social media platforms. For years, the Navy has hosted a career training symposium for female aviators, and in 2021, it introduced maternity flight suits for pregnant aviators. That same year, it hosted its first-ever diversity, equity, and inclusion summit for naval aviators.
These changes matter, an officer who attended the diversity summit tells The War Horse. "I'm hopeful in the next decade it will be different," she says.
"These types of things are always driven from the top," Sherrill, the congresswoman, says of changing cultures, whether in the military or in any large organization. "We need to create a fighting force with a great culture, a great climate, great dedication to duty. … When we find leaders who don't live up to those standards, we need to make sure they're not in leadership."
Multiple officers tell The War Horse that after the diversity, equity, and inclusion summit, they were contacted to submit their experiences as part of an inspector general investigation into the training culture within the naval aviation pipeline.
But several officers say they had not received updates on the investigation and did not know its outcome. Naval Air Forces did not respond to questions about the inspector general investigation.
And even as the Navy builds official support for diverse aviators, its efforts are not always embraced in the officer corps. In a pilot meme account on Instagram, a post mocked the diversity, equity, and inclusion summit after it was announced.
The account also crassly made fun of people who might report such posts.
Most flight students who spoke with The War Horse were adamant about anonymity, saying they feared repercussions in their careers.
"People would make my life a living f---ing hell if they found out I contributed to this," one pilot says.
Both Groom and Bennett said that after speaking with a Marine Corps public affairs officer, they believed they could face repercussions after this story published.
After she received the memo stating she was not being separated from the Marine Corps and could return to flight training, Groom says she met with her command.
"I was like, 'Wait. I have some questions,'" Groom says. She asked how she would be protected from any reprisal -- many of the same officers who had given negative testimony in her investigations were still involved with flight training.
She didn't have any reason to worry, she says she was told. This was a professional command.
This War Horse investigation was reported by Sonner Kehrt, edited by Kelly Kennedy, fact-checked by Jess Rohan, and copy-edited by Mitchell Hansen-Dewar. Headlines are by Abbie Bennett. Prepublication review was completed by BakerHostetler.
Sonner Kehrt is an investigative reporter at The War Horse, where she covers the military and climate change, misinformation, and gender. She can be reached at sonner.kehrt@thewarhorse.org and occasionally on Twitter @etskehrt.
She studied government at the U.S. Coast Guard Academy and served for five years as Coast Guard officer before earning a masters in democracy and governance studies from Georgetown University and a masters of journalism from UC Berkeley.
