New Delhi:
Squadron Leader Bhawana Kanth has just become the first woman to graduate from the Indian Air Force’s (IAF) elite “Top Gun” school. But this is a story eight years in the making. Back in 2021, Bhawana Kanth was already making history – the first woman fighter pilot to march the Republic Day parade, one of India’s original pioneering trio in the cockpit. From that runway to this record, she’s still rewriting the sky.
She once dreamed of the sky from a small town in Bihar. Today, that dream has a new name in history – her name.
The IAF’s “Top Gun” school called the Tactics and Air Combat Development Establishment in Gwalior has never had a woman graduate. Until now.
Squadron Leader Kanth has completed the punishing fighter combat leader course – 20 weeks of the most advanced combat flying training the IAF offers. Only about one in 100 pilots is even chosen to attempt it.
Squadron Leader Kanth flies the Sukhoi-30MKI fighter, having graduated to the premier jet after having flown the legacy MiG-21.
Rewind a decade. In 2016, Squadron Leader Kanth was one of three women commissioned as India’s first-ever women fighter pilots – alongside Avani Chaturvedi and Mohana Singh – stepping into a cockpit no Indian woman had entered before.
“For me, it was a childhood dream. Once I got the opportunity, I didn’t take a second to grab it and here I am… I don’t think it’s time now. I think it was time forever, the fact that the decision has come now doesn’t make it the time now,” Squadron Leader Kanth said in an interview in 2016.
Since then, she has touched the sky with glory.
In 2021, she became the first woman fighter pilot to take part in the Republic Day flypast and parade, standing on the IAF’s tableau at Rajpath. Before that, by 2019, she had already become the first woman fighter pilot qualified to undertake day combat missions, flying the MiG-21 Bison.
Now she’s mastered the most advanced air combat techniques, long-range precision strikes, the very future of aerial combat – training that shapes how the IAF fights tomorrow’s wars.
From breaking into the fighter stream, to breaking into the “Top Gun” club, Squadron Leader Kanth keeps rewriting what’s possible, one sortie at a time.
