Indian Air Force Flight Lieutenant Mohana Singh becomes first woman fighter pilot to qualify for Hawk sorties

Flight Lieutenant Mohana Singh has become the first woman fighter pilot to be qualified to undertake missions by day on Hawk advanced jet aircraft. She landed a gruelling 4 Aircraft combat sortie at Air Force station, Kalaikunda, West Bengal, which was the last syllabus sortie, of being fully operational on the Hawk Jets.

Singh’s training involved flying both Air to Air combat and Air to Ground missions and has undertaken many practice missions which involved firing of rockets, guns and dropping high calibre bombs and also participated in various Air Force Level flying exercises. She has a total of over 500 hours of incident free flying of which 380 hrs are on the Hawk Mk 132 jet.

Singh along with two other girls Bhawana Kanth and Avani Chaturvadi joined the fighter stream in June 2016.