Eileen Isola

The Lead Author and a debut author of her own memoir who knows the transformative power of storytelling, Eileen is an international airline pilot, a 1985 graduate of the US Air Force Academy, a decorated combat pilot, a breast cancer survivor, and a LGBTQ+ woman who survived a 24-year Air Force career hiding in plain sight dodging the ever-present threat of arrest and imprisonment simply for being gay.

 

Eileen was the first woman to serve as an Advance Agent to President of the United States.  She flew high performance jets, trained combat pilots and instructors, invaded other countries, airlifted humanitarian relief to war torn regions, resupplied radar sites on dirt strips in the Amazon jungles, cut the ribbon opening the Military Women’s Memorial at Arlington National Cemetery, commanded a C-130 squadron, crumbled barriers to women serving their country, and shattered glass ceilings flinging the glass onto the trash heap of history. 

 

Eileen has been featured on the front page of the New York Times, the San Antonio Express-News, and in numerous other newspapers across the country as the poster child for the extraordinary group of military women aviators who brought down the federal law that barred women from flying combat aircraft. She has been published in American Writers Review, Virginia Woman magazine, and on Medium.  Other work has been published by Air University Press, and quoted, cited or referenced in various Department of Defense and Executive Branch national security studies and publications.

 

The daughter of an international airline pilot, Eileen grew up immersed in the cultures of our world across three continents, from British primary education and picnicking in the Hindu Kush; to sharing fish with Bedouins, tea with Kazakh merchants, and shopping in the sooqs of Jeddah; to thwarting the nuns while attending boarding school in Italy.  She holds an undergraduate degree from the US Air Force Academy and two post-graduate degrees. 

 

All that said, she is happiest when lost amidst the giggles of Amelia and Leila, her granddaughters. When she’s not at 40,000 feet in the cockpit of her front row seat to the Universe, she makes her home in the Northern Shenandoah Valley of Virginia.