This Helmet Kept an Air Force Pilot Safe as She Was Soaring Through the Glass Ceiling
When a young Nicole Malachowski was dreaming about becoming a fighter pilot, she couldn’t have imagined the heights she’d fly as part of the elite Thunderbirds
From the earliest bronze armor to today’s lightweight carbon-fiber lids, a helmet’s job has always been simple: to protect the head of the person wearing it. But it can also tell us thrilling stories of technological imagination and sheer human grit.
The Gentex HGU-55/P is a standard-issue flight helmet for pilots in the United States Air Force, but the one you see here comes from a specialized squadron: the elite precision-flying aerial demonstration team known as the Thunderbirds, famous for their acrobatic air shows. Membership in military demonstration teams is highly competitive, and anyone who makes the cut is, forgive us, a rare bird. But this helmet belonged to a standout even among those top-shelf pilots: the first woman to perform with the Thunderbirds, Colonel Nicole Malachowski.
In 1979, when Malachowski was a 5-year-old in Santa Maria, California, she decided she wanted to be a military pilot. But there weren’t any women in combat positions. “In sixth grade, I stood up in front of my whole class and I said, ‘I’m going to be a fighter pilot,’” she tells Smithsonian. “And everybody started laughing. And my teacher said, ‘Sit down and come back next week when you have something more realistic.’ I did not know that it was against the law, and it would be against the law until 1992 for women to be fighter pilots.”
Did You Know? What’s the trail a Thunderbird jet leaves?
The famously dense jets of smoke that trail each Thunderbird come when pilots use a switch on the throttle to inject paraffin-based smoke oil directly into the exhaust. When the oil hits the exhaust, it vaporizes and billows into the smoke that leaves spectators gaping.That might have been the end of it, but Malachowski wasn’t going to be kept from the skies. She started flying lessons when she was 12 and made her first solo flight at 16. She might have become a commercial pilot but for a well-timed family visit to the Smithsonian during summer vacation. There, Malachowski learned about the Women Airforce Service Pilots, a.k.a. the WASPs, the civilian female squad who ferried aircraft, transported cargo, and assisted with training and support during World War II. “In a dark, dusty corner was a very small picture of the Women Airforce Service Pilots. I had never heard of them. Women were flying military aircraft ... they weren’t flying in combat, but they were training men to go to combat. And [that] reinvigorated my goal.”
Malachowski’s focus paid off in 1992, when she was accepted into the Air Force Academy, just in time to see the ban lifted on women flying combat missions. Malachowski flew 26 such missions during Operation Iraqi Freedom before being chosen for the Thunderbirds assignment in 2005. Over the next two years, she performed at more than 140 events, sometimes maneuvering her plane mere inches from her teammates’ as they soared in tightly coordinated formations designed to show off the Air Force’s finest pilots and equipment.
The helmet, which now resides at the National Air and Space Museum’s Steven F. Udvar-Hazy Center, in Chantilly, Virginia, also tells a story of innovation—about the forces that each generation of jet pilot has faced in the cockpit. “You can study the transition from the very beginning of aviation and see how the stresses and strains on a pilot have changed over time, just based on the flight clothing that they wear,” says Alex Spencer, curator of the flight material collection and the British and European military aircraft collection at the National Air and Space Museum, which holds 386 flight helmets, from the first days of pilotry to the present. In early planes with open cockpits, pilots were mostly concerned about staying warm in the rushing wind. “They wore Snoopy helmets,” as Spencer puts it. “Just a little leather cap to keep the wind out of their hair.” By the time F-16 supersonic jets entered the picture in the late 1970s, pilots had a whole different set of physical needs. By the ’90s, when Malachowski started flying for the Air Force, helmets featured padding, air hoses to provide oxygen, radio connections for in-flight communication, and visors to protect from sun and—if the worst should happen—debris.
Subscribe to Smithsonian magazine now for just $19.99
This article is a selection from the March 2026 issue of Smithsonian magazine
