How many combat missions has senator tammy duckworth flown as a helicopter pilot?

1. The publicly documented combat service: hours and context

Multiple official biographies and profiles assert that Duckworth deployed to Iraq in 2004 as a UH‑60 Black Hawk pilot with the Illinois Army National Guard and was “among the first handful of Army women to fly combat missions” during Operation Iraqi Freedom, and those same sources record she flew 120 combat hours over an eight‑month deployment before her aircraft was struck ^{[1] [4] [2] [3]}. Those 120 combat hours are the most specific quantitative measure in the provided reporting and appear repeatedly on her Senate website and allied biographical write‑ups, establishing a documented baseline of flight time rather than a mission count ^[2].

2. The defining event and its documentation

The dramatic and well‑chronicled incident on November 12, 2004 — when the Black Hawk she co‑piloted was hit by a rocket‑propelled grenade, resulting in the loss of both her legs and partial use of her right arm — is consistently reported across the same official and institutional profiles that describe her combat flying, and these accounts anchor her combat service in a specific operational timeline ^{[1] [3] [5]}. Those narratives emphasize her active role in combat sorties and her Purple Heart, but they stop short of enumerating how many individual missions she launched or completed prior to that event ^{[1] [5]}.

3. Why sources report hours not mission counts

The materials provided — which include Senator Duckworth’s official Senate biography, news excerpts reprinted on her site, alumni and museum profiles, and veterans’ organization write‑ups — consistently characterize her as an early female combat helicopter pilot and quantify her service by total combat flight hours (not mission counts), indicating that available public statements and institutional bios have chosen hours as the metric for operational experience in her case ^{[1] [2] [6] [7]}. The difference matters: “combat hours” is an aggregate measure that can reflect varied sortie lengths and mission types, whereas a “combat mission” can be defined differently by unit, command, or historian, which may explain why the cited reporting relies on hours ^{[2] [6]}.

4. Limits of the record and what remains unanswered

Based on the reporting supplied here, there is no explicit, verifiable count of how many discrete combat missions Duckworth flew; the sources repeatedly document that she flew combat missions and specify 120 combat hours over eight months, but none lists a missions total ^{[1] [2] [3] [7]}. Without contemporaneous flight logs, unit after‑action records, or a direct primary source that enumerates missions, the precise number of missions remains undocumented in the provided reporting; that gap should caution readers against repeating an exact missions figure that is not corroborated by these sources ^{[2] [8]}.

5. Final assessment: what can be stated with confidence

It is accurate to say Senator Tammy Duckworth served as a Black Hawk helicopter pilot in Iraq, was among the first Army women to fly combat sorties in Operation Iraqi Freedom, and logged about 120 combat flight hours in an eight‑month deployment prior to being wounded on November 12, 2004; the provided reporting does not, however, supply a precise count of individual combat missions she flew ^{[1] [2] [3]}. For anyone seeking a missions tally, the next step would be access to unit flight records, morning reports, or Duckworth’s own contemporaneous logs or statements beyond the materials reviewed here — none of which are contained in the supplied sources ^{[2] [8]}.