India’s first women fighter pilots in June

March 10, 2016 Incredible India Valli Sarvani No comments

Very soon India will be having its first women fighter pilots. Bhawana Kanth, Avani Chaturvedi and Mohana Singh will be setting a record for themselves by becoming the first Indian women fighter pilots.

IAF Air Chief Marshal Arup Raha said on International Women’s Day that there are three women trainees who have volunteered to join the fighter stream. He announced that they are currently undergoing training and they will become fighter pilots after it. Their passing out parade will be held on June 18, 2016 said the Air Chief Marshal.

The three women are currently undergoing flying training at the IAF academy near Hyderabad. They will be commissioned as officers into the fighter stream this June. The three along with their male counterparts have undergone Stage-I training on the newly acquired Swiss Pilatus PC-7 turboprop aircraft.

They are in stage-II now flying the Kiran Mark-II. After they finish their training, they will graduate from the IAF academy in June. They will then go through Stage-III, the final stage of training on Hawk advanced jet trainers for six months to learn completely about combat flying. After the final stage, they will become fully-fledged fighter pilots by early-2017.

Once they have become fighter pilots, they will be breaking the sound barrier in their supersonic jets by being inducted into regular fighter squadrons. Their flights could range from Mirage-2000s to Sukhoi-30MKIs.

As soon as these women become the fighter pilots, India will join several other countries like US, UK and Russia to Israel, Turkey and Pakistan which have allowed women to fly combat jets for decades. The India armed forces have opposed the idea of women being in combat roles for a long time. They have sited many operational, practical and socio-cultural problems. However, this is slowly changing over time.

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