black shoe

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English

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Noun

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black shoe (plural black shoes)

  1. (US, naval) A person who works on an aircraft carrier but is not involved in flights.
    Coordinate term: brown shoe
    • 2016, James E. Wise, Jr., Scott Baron, At the Helm of USS America, page 57:
      Hayward served aboard the aircraft carrier USS Antietam (CV-36) as a “black shoe” engineer until he entered flight training at Pensacola, Florida, []
    • 2022, Craig L. Symonds, Nimitz at War: Command Leadership from Pearl Harbor to Tokyo Bay, page 189:
      Towers attributed the whole catastrophe to the decision to put the carriers under the command of a black shoe like Kinkaid. As a result of that, he said, the United States was now without a single fully operational aircraft carrier in the whole of the Pacific Ocean.

References

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