Female military pilots breaking glass ceiling

Group Capt Kemba Hannays joins the elite cadre of women around the globe who broke the glass ceiling and successfully competed with their male counterparts for senior leadership positions in military aviation.

Hannays deserves congratulations on her recent promotion to the rank of group captain and commanding officer of the TT Air Guard (TTAG) with effect from January 1.

Her appointment is historic, as she is the first female commanding officer of the TTAG and the first female military officer in the Caricom to attain such a rank.

During my tenure as the director general of Civil Aviation, I knew Hannays professionally as a very competent and well respected rotary wing pilot.

She was among the first batch of pilots to receive flight training on the AW139 helicopter, which, at that time, was the most technologically-advanced helicopter, certified and operated in TT under very stringent civil aviation regulations.

Her colleagues at the TTAG saw her as a shining star whose brilliance, discipline, qualifications and leadership skills propelled her to qualify as an AW139 commander with an SAR rating.

She is a role model, seen by many in the aviation world as a future Air Chief Marshal.

Maj Mandisa Mfeka is the first black female combat pilot in the South African Air Force.

Mfeka became fascinated by planes from the age of five, when her grandmother took her to air shows at Virginia Airport near the east-coast city of Durban. She participated in President Cyril Ramaphosa's inauguration in May 2019 by doing an impressive high-speed flyby in a BAE Hawk fighter jet.

Capt Asli Hassan Abade was the first female air force pilot on the African continent. She was a member of the Somali Air Force.

She solo-piloted her first flight in September 1976. After the Somalian civil war, she migrated to the US.

Lieut Col Shawna Rochelle Kimbrell is the first female African-American fighter pilot in the history of the US Air Force.

During the Iraqi war, she flew the F-16 Fighting Falcon in combat missions in Operation Northern Watch. She is a member of the 78th attack squadron, stationed at Nellis Air Force Base, and serves as an MQ-9 Pilot and mission commander.

Squadron leader Yu Xu was a Chinese female fighter pilot who served in the aerobatic team of the People's Liberation Army (PLA) Air Force named August 1st, after the founding of the PLA on August 1, 1927. Her fans gave her the nickname Golden Peafowl.

Yu was among the first women certified to fly fighter jets after graduating from the PLA Air Force Aviation University. She was certified to fly the single-engine Chengdu J-10 jet.

In November 2016, Yu died at the age of 30 during an aerobatic training session as she ejected from the J-10 after being struck by another aircraft.

Squadron leader Avani Chaturvedi is the first Indian female combat pilot. In June 2018, at 25, she was inducted into the Indian Air Force and trained on the BAE Hawks fighter jet. She is currently with the Indian Air Force No 23 Squadron based in Rajasthan State.

Maj Gen Jeannie Leavitt is the US Air Force's first female general. She joined the air force in 1992 at 26. She is a graduate and former instructor of the US Air Force Weapons School and a command pilot with more than 3,000 hours.

In 1993, she became the US Air Force’s first female fighter pilot and in 2012, she was the first woman to command a USAF combat fighter wing as commander of the 4th fighter wing based at Seymour Johnson Air Force Base in North Carolina.

Leavitt became the first woman to take command of the 57th wing, based at Nellis Air Force Base, which is the air force’s most diverse flying wing, comprising 37 squadrons at 13 installations with more than 130 aircraft. She flew 300 combat hours, mostly in Afghanistan and Iraq.

Leavitt is the US Air Force chief of safety at present and is based at the Pentagon.

The world’s most famous female fighter pilot was Moscow-born Lidiya Litvyak – the first female pilot in World War II to shoot down a German aircraft.

Her impressive score of confirmed kills included shooting down over a dozen of Germany’s best fighter pilots, and four shared kills during 66 combat missions. This has never been exceeded by another female fighter pilot.

The western press covered her aerial exploits in glowing terms, calling her the White Rose of Stalingrad.

In June 1943, she was given command of a fighter squadron. On August 1, 1943, just before her 22nd birthday, while escorting a unit of Ilyushin IL-2 shturmovik strike aircraft returning from an attack during the battle of Kursk, her squadron was attacked by the German Luftwaffe.

The Germans singled out Litvyak’s Yak-1, a manoeuvrable, fast and competitive fighter aircraft with "23" painted on the fuselage. Eight German Messerschmitt Bf 109 fighters concentrated solely on attacking her.

She was last spotted through a gap in the clouds, her aircraft in a spiral, spewing smoke, and with the Germans in hot pursuit.

Her downed aircraft and her body were never found during the war. In 1979 her remains were found buried in Dmitrievka, a village in southeastern Kazakhstan.

On May 6, 1990, Soviet President Mikhail Gorbachev posthumously awarded her the nation’s highest military award, Hero of the Soviet Union.

Litvyak is remembered as one of the Soviet Union’s greatest military aviators who exemplified that competence, not gender, is the ultimate measure of a combat pilot.