Master Sgt. Kevin Clancy has launched KC-135 tail number 58-0045 countless times over his career as a crew chief, but one flight July 6 was different from the rest. This time, his own daughter was taking his pride and joy down the runway.
“I went over the checklist again and again in my head that day,” Clancy told Air & Space Forces Magazine. “You launch hundreds of jets over the years, but this one had my kid on it.”
1st Lt. Megan Hirlehey was 0045’s co-pilot that day on her first mission assigned to the Pennsylvania Air National Guard’s 171st Air Refueling Wing. Hirlehey had practically grown up on the wing’s base outside Pittsburgh, where Clancy has worked since the late 1980s.
“I wanted to do this ever since I was a kid,” Hirlehey said.
Aerial refueling has long been a family affair for the two Airmen. As first reported in a recent press release, Clancy stayed on base for five straight days during the high-alert period immediately after Sept. 11, 2001. At one point his wife and two daughters stopped by to drop off a clean set of clothes, and during the visit one of the KC-135 pilots, Brian Krawchyk, took the kids to a refrigerator on base.
“He said ‘close your eyes,’ and then he opened the door and it was full of ice cream,” Clancy recalled. “The family joke is that that’s what made Megan decide to join the Guard.”
For her part, Hirlehey remembers seeing flight-suited aviators walking around the base and wanting to join their ranks, but it wasn’t the easiest journey. She enlisted with the 171st shortly before graduating high school in 2008, serving in the base’s education and training office and as an aerial port specialist at the base’s air terminal. Her goal was to commission and become a pilot, but there was a problem: at 5-foot-2, she did not meet the Air Force’s height requirement, and she was unable to get a waiver.
Her luck turned a few years later when the Air Force changed its height requirements to expand the pool of eligible pilot candidates. She finally received a waiver and was approved in 2019, but there was another problem: the COVID-19 pandemic, which made an already-long process that much longer.
Hirlehey’s patience paid off: she commissioned in 2020, made it through the Air Force’s pilot training pipeline, and reported back to the 171st earlier this year.
“It’s just very surreal to be back here,” she said. “I watched the pilots walk around here for 15 years wanting to be one of them.”
As the day of Hirlehey’s first flight with the wing drew near, Clancy requested to work in the aircraft hangar that day to make sure he could see his daughter take off. He got more than that: the mission planners made sure Hirlehey’s first flight was on 58-0045, the jet Clancy had served on as dedicated crew chief for six years. At one point Clancy named the jet “Global Reach” and designed nose art of the jet refueling a B-52 bomber over the western hemisphere.
“I called it ‘Global Reach’ because that’s what tankers provide to the Air Force,” he said.
Over the course of countless hours keeping an aircraft ready to fly, many crew chiefs come to think of their jets as their own flesh and blood. On July 6, Clancy watched his daughter fly away with his baby, so to speak. The crew chief waved the aircraft out of the chocks and saluted on its way out. He stood on the pilot’s side, according to standard practice, so he could not directly see Hirlehey through the cockpit window, but he walked away “smiling ear to ear” nonetheless.
“With a jet that old there’s always a chance something might not work,” he said. “I was so thankful that she didn’t have to go to a spare.”
A few hours and an uneventful flight later, Hirlehey returned the KC-135 safe and sound and Clancy turned the jet around so it was ready for the next mission. The flight marked a changing of the guard: as Hirlehey begins her own flying career, Clancy is set to retire in three months after 38 and a half years in uniform. The flight was “kind of the last thing I’m hanging around for,” he said.
The old hand was grateful to end things on such a high note.
“Not many crew chiefs get to retire with this honor,” he said.