In June 2016, a 23-year-old engineering graduate from Bihar stood on a stage in Hyderabad alongside two other women, becoming part of an experiment the Indian Air Force had approved only months earlier: letting women fly fighter jets. A decade on, Squadron Leader Bhawana Kanth has gone further than any woman in the country’s history.
On 6 August 2026, she became the first woman to complete the Fighter Combat Leader (FCL) course, the IAF’s most demanding tactical qualification, often compared to the United States Navy’s “Top Gun” programme.
Kanth cleared the 20-week course at the Tactics and Air Combat Development Establishment (TACDE) in Gwalior, Madhya Pradesh, the IAF’s highest centre for operational combat training. Only about 1% of the force’s fighter pilots are selected for the programme each intake, and a significant share do not make it through.
Those who graduate return to their squadrons as fighter combat leaders, tasked with shaping air combat tactics, planning weapons deployment and training the pilots who fly frontline missions after them.
A decade of firsts
Kanth’s path to TACDE began the way it began for every woman in the IAF’s fighter stream, at the Air Force Academy in Hyderabad, where she, Avani Chaturvedi and Mohana Singh were commissioned as the first three women fighter pilots in June 2016.
Kanth grew up in Begusarai, where her father worked as an engineer, and studied medical electronics at BMS College of Engineering in Bengaluru before applying to the Air Force.
She started out flying the MiG-21 Bison, one of the IAF’s oldest and most unforgiving jets, from an airbase in Bikaner, Rajasthan. In May 2019, she became the first Indian woman fighter pilot cleared for daytime combat missions, a qualification that placed her among a small number of women worldwide flying frontline sorties.
Bhawana Kanth was among the first three women commissioned as fighter pilots by the Indian Air Force in June 2016. Photograph: (Instagram/@dnn24network)
Two years later, she became the first woman fighter pilot to take part in the Republic Day parade, standing on the IAF’s tableau alongside models of the Su-30 MKI.
She subsequently moved from the MiG-21 Bison to the twin-engine Su-30 MKI, and in 2020 received the Nari Shakti Puraskar, India’s highest civilian honour recognising women’s achievement, for her contribution to combat aviation.
Clearing the IAF’s toughest classroom
TACDE trains some of the IAF’s most experienced pilots and controllers, and the FCL course pushes them through advanced aerial combat manoeuvring, weapons employment and mission planning under sustained pressure.
The washout rate is steep enough that graduation is treated as a career-defining honour even among seasoned fighter pilots, let alone a first for any woman.
Kanth began her fighter pilot career flying the MiG-21 Bison from an airbase in Bikaner, Rajasthan. Photograph: (India Today)
Kanth’s achievement sits within a longer arc of women breaking into India’s combat cockpits. Long before the fighter stream opened to women, pilots like Gunjan Saxena and Srividya Rajan flew unarmed helicopters into hostile territory during the 1999 Kargil war, evacuating wounded soldiers under fire years bef ore combat aviation was formally open to them.
Since 2016, that cohort has widened considerably. Officers such as Shivangi Singh went on to fly the Rafale, while women from states as far from the original three as Karnataka have gone on to join the fighter stream in the years since.
For Kanth, the FCL qualification carries weight beyond her own career. Fighter combat leaders influence how squadrons train, plan missions and fight for years after their own operational postings end, giving her a direct hand in shaping the pilots, including the women, who will fly after her. Ten years after she first walked onto a fighter squadron as an experiment, she now stands at the top of the IAF’s tactical hierarchy, training the force that once had no place for her at all.
