Flight Lieutenant Mohana Singh becomes first woman fighter pilot to fly Hawk jet

Flight Lt. Mohana Singh has become the first woman fighter pilot to fly by day on a Hawk advanced jet aircraft, an official statement said on Friday.

The statement said the woman officer landed after a gruelling 4-aircraft combat sortie at Kalaikunda Air Force station in West Bengal, which was the last syllabus sortie of being fully operational on the Hawk jets.

She and two other women officers - Bhawana Kanth and Avani Chaturvedi - joined the fighter stream in June 2016.

Last week, Flight Lt. Bhawana Kanth became the first daytime woman fighter pilot to fly a MiG-21 Bison.

Singh's training involved flying both air-to-air combat and air-to-ground missions.

She has undertaken many practice missions which involved firing of rockets, guns and dropping high calibre bombs and has also participated in various Air Force level flying exercises.

She has a total of over 500 hours of incident-free flying of which 380 hours are on the Hawk Mk 132 jet.