U.S.M.C. Lt. Col. Amy McGrath (ret.), combat pilot, college instructor and political candidate
Retired U.S. Marine Corps Lt. Col. Amy McGrath (born June 3, 1975), a former fighter pilot and military academy instructor, is a Democratic candidate for the U.S. Senate in Kentucky. She served in the Marines for 20 years, flying 89 combat missions and was the first female marine to fly the F/A-18 supersonic jet in combat.
She was born in Cincinnati to Donald and Marianne McGrath. Her father was a schoolteacher and her mother a polio survivor, who went on to become one of the first women to graduate from the University of Kentucky medical school. Amy McGrath was an exceptional athlete in high school and, in 1993, received an appointment to the U.S. Naval Academy, which she graduated from in 1997 with a bachelor’s in political science.
After completing flight school in 1999, McGrath became a weapons system officer and was assigned to the Marine All-Weather Fighter Attack Squadron 121. She and fellow pilot Jaden Kim were the first female aviators to join the squadron. On September 11, 2001, she was paired with a fellow pilot to wait on the flight line to protect Los Angeles and potentially shoot down any hijacked aircraft. In 2002, she was deployed to Kyrgyzstan as part of Operation Enduring Freedom in Afghanistan, where she became the first woman to fly combat for the U.S. Marine Corps. The following year, she supported ground troops during Operation Iraqi Freedom, and, from 2007 to 2009, she was deployed to East Asia as part of Fighter-Attack Squadron 106. In 2010, she was again deployed to Afghanistan, and, in 2011, she returned to the States to serve as a congressional fellow for U.S. Rep. Susan Davis (D-CA). For the next two years, she worked at the Pentagon as a Marine Corps liaison to the State Department and the U.S. Agency for International Development. In 2014, she earned a master’s in international and global security studies from Johns Hopkins University. From 2014 to 2017, she was a senior political science instructor at the U.S. Naval Academy.
She retired from the Marine Corps in 2017 as a lieutenant colonel. The next year, she ran for Kentucky’s 6th District in the U.S. House of Representatives. She lost to the Republican incumbent but received 48 percent of the vote. In 2019, she announced her candidacy for the U.S. Senate.