26 | AUGUST 2019 FLYINGMAG.COM
TAKING WING
was one of the first certified pilots
in the United States—the family still
has his first pilot’s license signed
by Orville Wright—and Hugh grew
up as a Southwest captain’s kid who
managed and expanded the family
scrapping business before succumb-
ing to fate and becoming an airline
pilot himself. As you can perhaps tell,I have a bit of a man crush on Hugh.
I can say, without a hint of hyperbole,
that Sylvia is one of the smartest people
I have ever met. She graduated in the
top of her high school class and gained
admission to a combined bachelor’s/
doctorate program at Rice University
and Baylor College of Medicine. While
at Rice, she got her degree in anthro-
pology and volunteered for various
causes—working as an emergency
medical technician and doing med-
ical internships in far-flung locales
like Peru and South Africa. All the
while, she was a pretty serious com-
petitive glider pilot, flying regional
and national competitions plus theAustralian Junior Nationals (“Joey
Glide”) and setting several national dis-
tance records. She met Hugh at an air-
port along the way; he bought Sylvia
her first helicopter flight the day after
she completed her first-year medical
school exams at Baylor.
Shortly thereafter, Sylvia concluded
that she didn’t really want to be a doc-tor and would never be happy in that
profession. So she dropped out of Baylor
to the almost universal horror of fam-
ily, friends and professors. She had
everything going for her, things she had
worked for her entire life, and she threw
it all away rather than continue down a
path that was making her miserable. She
didn’t really have a plan B other than the
vague notion that she would do some-
thing in aviation. Quitting med school
was one of the hardest things she’s ever
done, and I’m impressed that she had
the honesty and the guts to do it.
Sylvia was in a tough place for a bit—
wandering and broke and wondering if
she had done the right thing. She stayed
afloat with part-time jobs flight instruct-
ing in gliders and wrenching on warbirds
as a mechanic’s assistant. She reached
out to one of her close aviation friends
and mentors—a U.S. Army warrantofficer and experimental test pilot—
and soon followed his lead and joined
the Army to fly helicopters, surprising
many of us who knew her. Mind you, she
was one of my more liberal friends, and
this was at a time when helicopter crews
were still absorbing heavy combat losses
in Iraq and Afghanistan.
She earned first pick of aircraft
in her f light school class and chose
the CH-47F Chinook, telling me she
was enamored with its reputation
as a high-altitude workhorse. Since
then, she has deployed to Afghanistan
twice and accumulated more than
900 hours of combat f lying as a pilot
and instructor. I lived in a state of
perpetual unease while Sylvia was in
Afghanistan, my heart dropping every
time the news announced another
Chinook crash. Thankfully, she made
it through unscathed.
Before Sylvia’s second deployment,
she applied for and was accepted to the
U.S. Army’s Experimental Test Pilot
program—a pretty huge deal for a Chief
Warrant Officer of her age and expe-
rience, not to mention her lack of an
engineering degree. She is, in fact, the
Army’s first female warrant-officer test
pilot. The Army sends their test-pilot
candidates to attend the United States
Naval Test Pilot School at Patuxent River
Naval Air Station, where they go through
the full 11-month test-pilot course along
with Navy, Air Force, Marines and inter-
national-student counterparts.
The rotary-wing curriculum at Pax
River is a notoriously tough program,
but Sylvia excelled and graduated with
Class 151. She also survived her nar-
rowest scrape—worse than any she had
been through in Afghanistan—when
her UH-60 Black Hawk suffered a
catastrophic engine failure at the abso-
lute worst-possible moment during a
single-engine test: other engine at idle,
high airspeed and low altitude as called
for by the test card she was flying. “If we
each hadn’t responded immediately and
done everything absolutely perfectly,
we wouldn’t be here,” she says. Gladly,
both pilots did, and the Army recog-
nized her and her instructor pilot’s feat
of airmanship with the rare U.S. Army
Broken Wing Award.Long, Strange TripHaving chosen the CH-47F for its rug-
gedness and reliability, Sylvia Grandstaff
logged over 900 combat hours during her
two deployments to Afghanistan.