Women Fly High

Yunus Dar

Three women, Avani Chaturvedi, Bhawana Kanth and Mohana Singh made history in 2017 when they were selected as the first women fighter pilots in the Indian Air Force (IAF), after the government made the decision in 2015 to allow the women to take on the new roles. The women officers until 2017 could fly only transport aircraft and the helicopters in the IAF, and with the new decision by the government opening the fighter pilot positions for them, gave them an opportunity to prove their mettle in combat roles.

The then defence minister, Manohar Parrikar with India’s first women fighter pilots, Flying Officer Avani
Chaturvedi, Flying Officer Bhavana Kanth, and Flying Officer Mohana Singh, at Air Force Academy,
Hyderabad

The IAF, for the first time, allowed women in operational duties in 1992, before which they were only present in the medical branch of the force. The women doctors and nurses had been serving in all three services from the beginning. The following year, 1993 saw the induction of the first batch of seven women for the pilots’ course. On 2 September 1994, the 22-year-old Harita Deol made history when she flew solo in an Avro HS-748, the first woman to fly in the IAF without any co-pilot.

The IAF employs the largest percentage of women officers among the three defence services, currently having over 1,594 women officers in service, of which more than a 100 are frontline pilots. In the last three years, the IAF has continued with the trend by inducting the largest percentage of women into its fold. Until 2015, they were consigned to ground and technical duties in the force, and while they could fly other aircraft, induction as fighter pilots w