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 four-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.
Mohana Singh had gone through a strenuous training programme that involved flying both air-to-air combat and air-to-ground missions. Her practice sessions also involved firing rockets, guns and dropping high calibre bombs and several air force-level flying exercises.
Mohana Singh now has an experience of 500 hours of incident-free flying of which 380 hours are on the Hawk Mk 132 jet.
In June 2018, for the first time, woman combat pilots were inducted in the Indian Air Force (IAF) with the then defence minister, Manohar Parrikar, commissioning Mohana Singh, Bhawana Kanth and Avani Chaturvedi. The trio 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.
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