Remembering ALPA’s Only Tuskegee Airman

Of the nearly 1,000 Tuskegee Airmen, Capt. Robert Ashby (Frontier, Ret.), who flew west on March 5, 2021, was the only one to become an ALPA member.

In a 2011 interview by F/O Walter Goins (Delta), whose father trained with Ashby in 1945, Ashby reminisced about his military and airline careers and the history he helped make.

Rising Through Prejudice: Ashby’s Military Career

In July 1944, Ashby, having just graduated from high school, entered the U.S. Army Air Corps and was based at Keesler Air Force Base, Miss. When he heard about the Tuskegee Airmen program to train Black pilots, he applied and was accepted in the spring of 1945.

After primary training in PT-17 Stearman open-cockpit biplanes, he took basic training in AT-6 Texans, then was selected for advanced training on the B-25 Mitchell medium bomber. World War II ended before Ashby could serve in combat, but he went on to fly night interdiction missions in B-26s in Korea and trained to deliver nukes in B-45s (four-engine jets built during the beginning of the Cold War). After the B-45s came the B-66. His final airplane was the B-47, a fast medium bomber.

Ashby recalls some of the policies and prejudices that he and his fellow Tuskegee Airmen endured. For example, of the 992 pilots trained through the program, “only 350 or so went overseas and fought in combat,” he pointed out. “We already had four squadrons operating in Europe. The white commanders didn’t want any more Black pilots. We were losing a lot of bombers for lack of escorts. It’s intriguing that we had leaders in the U.S. military who would sacrifice lives to continue segregation.”

Later, while in Alabama to undergo his initial jet training in T-33s at Maxwell Air Force Base, he could not ride in a “white” taxicab with a fellow officer from his unit or use a “white” payphone to call the base for ground transportation. Yet a few months later, he was flying B-45s with the 47th Bomb Wing in England.

“The 47th Bomb Wing was the only bomb outfit with nukes,” Ashby recalled. “We had targets all over Russia.”

Ashby retired as a lieutenant colonel in July 1965.

Facing Discrimination from the Airlines

After his military career, Ashby applied to 20 or so airlines but heard only from United, who hired him as a flight operations instructor on the B-727. He taught ground school and instructed in flight simulators and in the airplane—but only flight engineers. As a flight operations instructor, he was not given a seniority number.

When United finished the monumental task of transitioning flight crews from piston-powered airliners to jets, the demand for training dropped dramatically, and Ashby was furloughed in 1972.

Now in his 40s, Eastern bluntly told Ashby that the airline wouldn’t hire him because he was too old. He responded, “But that’s against the law!” The Eastern manager merely shrugged and said that if Ashby fought it, the airline would find some other reason to not hire him.

“Can You Be Here Monday?”

Back in Denver, Colo., he visited Frontier to inquire about his application. “That was on a Friday,” he smiled. “They asked, ‘Can you be here Monday?’ They had a new-hire class starting on Monday, and someone couldn’t make it; they hated to have an empty slot.”

Ashby joined Frontier on January 29, 1973. Starting as a B-737 flight engineer (a few airlines flew Seven Threes with an engineer then), he moved on to Dash 7s, Convair 580s, and MD-80s before moving up to B-737 captain.

Emily Howell, the first woman to become a pilot for a modern U.S. airline, was in Ashby’s new-hire class.

“There was some opposition to Emily and me being there,” Ashby recalled. “The majority of the [other pilots] were okay with it, but there’s always a few who can’t accept change. When I got off probation, some pilots didn’t want ALPA to accept me as a member.”

Things Have Changed

Of the fact that he alone of the Tuskegee Airmen became an airline pilot, Ashby said, “That’s a bad mark against the airlines. But now, the military and the airline industry are just about the best equal opportunity employers. Aviation is such a splendid career field.”