Pilot Pondered Suicide Over Adultery Flap, Book Says

NEW YORK — Former Air Force pilot Kelly Flinn pondered suicide before resigning to avoid a court-martial for lying about an affair with a married man.

Flinn’s book, “Proud to Be,” is excerpted in the Nov. 24 issue of Newsweek. She gives her version of the affair with Mark Zigo, a married man at Minot Air Force Base, N.D., and the subsequent investigation that forced her out of the service.

“I had never been a depressed person in my life,” wrote Flinn, the nation’s only female B-52 pilot. “Now I went to bed every night praying to God that I wouldn’t wake up in the morning. I never actually attempted suicide. But I thought about it, hard.”

Flinn, 26, resigned in May and took a general discharge rather than face charges of adultery, lying and disobeying an order.

“Shooting myself would have been too messy, though. I didn’t want my parents to have to clean up a mess,” she wrote. “So I’d go to a drugstore and look at all the sleeping pill racks and think about which pills would work best.”