First US woman to fly the F-35A stealth fighter

WASHINGTON: A female US Air Force F-35A pilot made history recently by becoming the first woman to fly the fighter into combat, the Air Force announced this week, foreign media reported.

Deployed to Al Dhafra Air Base in the United Arab Emirates, Capt. Emily Thompson, call sign “Banzai,” flew a fifth-generation F-35A Lightning II Joint Strike Fighter into combat, becoming the first female pilot to do so. She is on her first deployment, and the flight marked her first combat sortie.

“Being the first female, it’s a pretty big honor,” Thompson said in an Air Force statement.

“There’s a lot of females who have come before me and there’s a lot of females already flying combat sorties in other platforms,” she said. “So, just to be the person who gets that honor, that first, it just meant a lot.”

Thompson, who had planned to be an engineer before she realized that she could fly instead of just fix airplanes, started her career in the Air Force flying F-16 Fighting Falcons but then later transferred to the F-35A, the variant of the Lockheed Martin stealth fighter built for the Air Force.

Thompson is part of a small group of female F-35 pilots, but she said that “the opportunity for women to really excel in the F-35 is definitely there.”

The F-35, which comes in three different variants, is the most expensive weapon system in the history of the US military, with an anticipated total development and procurement cost of roughly $400 billion and an operating and maintenance cost of around $1.2 trillion, Bloomberg News recently reported, citing Pentagon assessments.

The F-35 stealth fighter first entered into combat with the Israeli Air Force in May 2018, when IAF Maj. Gen. Amikam Norkin proudly announced Israel was “the first in the world to use the F-35 in operational activity.”