black shoe
English
editNoun
editblack shoe (plural black shoes)
- (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.