Listen free for 30 days

Listen with offer

  • Kimberly's Flight

  • The Story of Captain Kimberly Hampton, America’s First Woman Combat Pilot Killed in Battle
  • By: Ann Hampton, Anna Simon
  • Narrated by: Johanna Parker
  • Length: 6 hrs and 38 mins

Pick 1 audiobook a month from our unmatched collection - including bestsellers and new releases.
Listen all you want to thousands of included audiobooks, Originals, celeb exclusives, and podcasts.
Access exclusive sales and deals.
£7.99/month after 30 days. Renews automatically. See here for eligibility.
Kimberly's Flight cover art

Kimberly's Flight

By: Ann Hampton, Anna Simon
Narrated by: Johanna Parker
Try for £0.00

£7.99/month after 30 days. Renews automatically. See here for eligibility.

Buy Now for £14.99

Buy Now for £14.99

Pay using card ending in
By completing your purchase, you agree to Audible's Conditions of Use and authorise Audible to charge your designated card or any other card on file. Please see our Privacy Notice, Cookies Notice and Interest-based Ads Notice.

Listeners also enjoyed...

Warrior: A Spiritual Odyssey cover art
Brothers Forever cover art
High Calling cover art
Vietnam cover art
The Greatest Generation Speaks cover art
Battle Ready cover art
The Silence of War cover art
Tough as They Come cover art
Desert Redleg: Artillery Warfare in the First Gulf War cover art
Jimmy Stewart: Bomber Pilot cover art
Six Years in the Hanoi Hilton cover art
The Mirror Test cover art
Barbara Bush cover art
The Eyes of Orion cover art
My Brother in Arms cover art
What Now, Lieutenant? cover art

Summary

U.S. Army Captain Kimberly N. Hampton was living her dream: flying armed helicopters in combat and commanding D Troop, 1st Squadron, 17th Cavalry, the armed reconnaissance aviation squadron of the 82nd Airborne Division. An all-American girl from a small southern mill town, Kimberly was a top scholar, student body president, ROTC battalion commander, and highly ranked college tennis player. In 1998 she was commissioned as a second lieutenant in the Army. Then, driven by determination and ambition, Kimberly rapidly rose through the ranks in the almost all-male bastion of military aviation to command a combat aviation troop.

On January 2, 2004, Captain Hampton was flying an OH-58D Kiowa Warrior helicopter above Fallujah, Iraq, in support of a raid on an illicit weapons marketplace, searching for an illusive sniper on the rooftops of the city. A little past noon her helicopter was wracked by an explosion. A heat-seeking surface-to-air missile had gone into the exhaust and knocked off the helicopter's tail boom. The helicopter crashed, killing Kimberly.

Kimberly's Flight is the story of Captain Hampton's exemplary life. This story is told through nearly 50 interviews and her own emails to family and friends, and is entwined with Ann Hampton's narrative of loving and losing a child.

Retired award-winning journalist Anna Simon was been a reporter with The Greenville News in South Carolina for 21 years. She received the South Carolina Press Association's first place award for Reporting in Depth for 2009, and is a past recipient of multiple awards in education reporting, the press association's Judson Chapman Award for Community Service, and other news and feature writing awards.

Kimberly's mother, Ann Hampton, first met Anna Simon at the bleakest point in her life, immediately following her daughter's death, when Ms. Simon wrote a series of stories for The Greenville News about Kimberly's life and the reaction in the small Southern town of Easley, SC to her death. Ann has traveled twice to Iraq, in 2010, as a Gold Star Mom in a "Hugs for Healing" program sanctioned by the U.S. State Department, where American and Iraqi mothers grieving the deaths of their children worked side-by-side on humanitarian projects, and in 2011 on a humanitarian mission with "Friends of Kurdistan".

©2012 Anna Simon and Ann Hampton (P)2013 Audible, Inc.

What listeners say about Kimberly's Flight

Average customer ratings

Reviews - Please select the tabs below to change the source of reviews.