Tuskegee Airman Robert J. Friend has died

Friend, who would rise to the rank of lieutenant colonel, flew North American P–51 Mustang and Republic P–47 Thunderbolt fighters in Europe with the Tuskegee Airmen’s 322nd Fighter Group.

According to an obituary published in The New York Times, his death leaves 11 surviving Tuskegee Airmen of the 355 members of the group of all-black fighter pilots.

A Sept. 10, 2018, profile of Friend on the website of the U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs noted that he always dreamed of flying but on trying to enlist in the military in the 1930s “was unable to as African-Americans were not allowed in the Army Air Corps at that time.”

A South Carolina native, Friend attended Lincoln University in Pennsylvania, and in 1939 earned a private pilot certificate. He succeeded in enlisting in the Army Air Forces in 1942 and trained at Tuskegee Institute in Alabama, the facility for which the famed unit was informally named and would become renowned. Friend became the 322nd Fighter Group’s combat operations officer, a position in which he planned and organized missions, it said.

 

According to the published obituary—which noted that Friend and the other members of the Tuskegee Airmen were recipients of the Congressional Gold Medal—after the war he studied astrophysics and business, and continued as a military operations officer during the Korean War and the Vietnam War. From 1958 to 1963 he led the secret government investigation of UFOs known as project Blue Book—later expressing skepticism in an interview “for practical reasons” that visits to Earth from extraterrestrials had ever occurred. He participated in three rocket programs and later would assume executive posts at companies in the aerospace industry, the obituary said.

The U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs tribute, posted when he was 98, said Friend, a widower who had been married three times, had seven children and numerous grandchildren, was “a master bridge player and an active supporter of the program Ride 2 Recovery which helps benefit mental and physical rehabilitation programs for wounded Veterans.”