Columnist: 25-year-old Springs grad redefines jet-setting

Lindsay McWhirter has a $1 million view at work.

But then, she has a $202 million office: a C-17 Globemaster III strategic airplane.

“It’s not a typical day job,” says the 25-year-old Air Force pilot stationed with the 535th Airlift Squadron at Hickam Air Force Base in Hawaii.

“I get to travel, fly around the world.”

From her “office” in the wild blue yonder, the Earth is a tapestry of crystal blue oceans, sparkling lights and shimmering white sand.

“Flying around, this is what I get to see every day,” McWhirter says. “I get excited when I get to fly over land.”

She was known for her talent as a swing dancer at Air Academy High School. After graduation in 2000, she went to Clemson University on a full ROTC scholarship.

“No one in my family is in the military. I wanted to fly for some reason,” says the daughter of a schoolteacher mom and mortgage broker dad.

McWhirter had to board a commercial flight on a recent trip to Colorado Springs to visit her parents. “I don’t like sitting in back,” she says.

She was commissioned in May 2004, had pilot training in Mississippi, then scored the C-17 assignment in Hawaii. Even with 16-hour workdays, she says, “It’s pretty much the dream assignment.”

She is a first lieutenant and soon will be promoted to captain. She flies with a co-pilot and loadmaster.

The gray aircraft is 174 feet long, with a wingspan of 169 feet.

How big is that? A pro football field is 160 feet wide. Imagine landing that on ice in Antarctica. “It could,” she says. “I haven’t gotten to do that — yet.”

She’s pretty much circled the globe. Once she took five trucks and a bulldozer. Most are supply deliveries or medical passenger transports.

“Sometimes,” she says, “it feels like you’re a bus driver.”

Maybe so, but that’s not the reaction Joyce McWhirter gets from people about her daughter’s doings.

“They say, ‘Your daughter flies a C-17?’ It’s kind of like being a rock star,” the mom says.

The young pilot takes it in stride. “It doesn’t seem like that to me,” she says, “because everyone I work with does it. It’s what we do all the time.”

She was deployed last fall to Incirlik Air Base in Turkey, making frequent missions to Iraq. “Flying in Iraq was a lot more stressful,” she says.

“The typical mission was taking pallets of supplies for the ground troops. We’d take off out of Turkey, fly down range, be on the ground for less than 30 minutes. We’d leave the engines on, get the cargo off, fly back to Turkey, be back in Turkey a couple hours to load up our plane and do it again.”

She volunteered for the mission: “I wanted to have that experience.”

She had some close calls, from bullets and bad weather.

“Most of the time nothing bad or crazy happens.

“It’s like (the movie) ‘Groundhog Day,’ and that’s good,” she says. “You want everything to be the same and routine.”

Tell me your stories: 636-0253 or andrea.brown@gazette.com.