The MA-1 Flight Jacket
THE MA-1 FLIGHT JACKET
A jacket built for the jet age
CASE FILE // UNITED STATES
Every punk, skinhead, rapper, fashion designer, and dad at a Home Depot has owned one at some point. It started out as a piece of Air Force equipment, and a pretty specific one.
The MA-1 wasn't designed to look cool. It was designed because jets nearly made the leather flight jacket a hazard.
THE LEATHER PROBLEM
In the propeller era, aircrew wore fleece-lined leather. That works fine until you fly a jet, which climbs higher, gets colder, and puts you in a cramped cockpit full of new equipment. Leather wet with rain or sweat could freeze at altitude, and a bulky shearling jacket didn't help anyone get in or out of a cockpit quickly (Wikipedia).
(For the record, this is not a knock on the B-3. The sheepskin bomber did its job over Europe in 1943. It just wasn't built for a fighter jet in 1955.)
The answer was nylon. It had been invented before World War II and went into parachutes during the war, but it didn't show up in flight clothing until afterward. The first attempt was the B-15, which had a wool pile collar that got tangled in parachute harness straps. The MA-1 came from fixing the B-15 (Wikipedia).
WHAT MAKES AN MA-1 AN MA-1
The Air Force designed the MA-1 as an intermediate-weight jacket you could wear all year. It used high-quality nylon shell fabric with polyester insulation, so you could wear it open on a warm flight line and zip it up in a cold cockpit (Wikipedia).
The details are what collectors look for:
- Knit collar, cuffs, and waistband in place of the B-15's fur collar, so nothing snagged on harness straps.
- Sage green shell. The earlier B-15 and L-2 jackets came in dark blue before switching to green, because green made more sense if a pilot had to hide on the ground (Wikipedia).
- Safety-orange lining. The official jacket was reversible. A downed airman could turn it inside out and become very easy to spot for the search and rescue crew.
- The sleeve pocket. A zip pocket with pen slots on the left arm, which pilots (and everyone else since) found very handy (Esquire).
So you've got a green jacket for hiding and an orange jacket for getting found, in one garment. Very efficient.
MIL-J-8279, OR: THE PAPERWORK
Like every good piece of government equipment, the MA-1 came with a spec sheet. The original design was covered by military specification MIL-J-8279, and it went through a long run of letter revisions. MIL-J-8279F, issued in November 1978, is considered the most important of them (Wikipedia).
The first jackets went to Air Force and Navy pilots and flight crews, plus a small number of Army flight personnel. Alpha Industries won the MA-1 contract in 1963, the same year it picked up the N-2B "split hood" parka (Wikipedia). Later on, Alpha and Rothco both exported MA-1s to European air forces and to civilian buyers.
The last revisions, MIL-J-8279G in 1988 and its amendment in October 1990, were for ground crews only. By then aircrew had moved on to the fire-resistant CWU-36/P and CWU-45/P jackets (Wikipedia). The MA-1 was phased out in the early '90s and wound up its active service around the Gulf War (Esquire).
FROM THE FLIGHT LINE TO THE STREET
The MA-1 reached civilians early. Small numbers turned up in Europe in the mid-to-late 1950s, most likely through the black market and surplus sales (Wikipedia). In Vietnam, American servicemen bought commercial copies in camouflage, because of course they did.
After that, everyone wanted one:
- The original English skinheads of the late '60s (the non-racist, reggae-loving kind) wore it as a tougher version of the Harrington jacket the mods had worn (Esquire).
- Punks, mods, and skinheads wore it through the late '70s, and in the '80s it was all over The Face and i-D (Wikipedia).
- Steve McQueen wore one in The Hunter, and in the early '90s Onyx and Naughty by Nature made the nylon flight jacket part of the street uniform (Esquire).
The U.S. no longer issues it, but the militaries of Israel, Japan, South Korea, the Philippines, Taiwan, and Thailand have all used the MA-1 (Wikipedia). Not bad for a jacket that started as a fix for a collar problem.
WHY IT'S IN THE MANIFEST
The MA-1 might be the most successful piece of military clothing ever made. It works on a flight line, a city street, and a cold morning at the gas station, and it looks right in all three places.
We carry the Rothco MA-1 Flight Jacket, built by one of the same companies that exported the originals. If you want the jacket the MA-1 replaced, the B-3 Sheepskin Bomber Jacket is in the manifest too. For the full aviator kit, add an ASA Circular E6B Flight Computer.
SOUTHERN AIR TRADE // THE MANIFEST