US Air Force pilot becomes the first woman to fly the F-35A stealth fighter into combat - US Air Force Capt. Emily Thompson, 421st Expeditionary Fighter Squadron pilot,.jpg ...

https://www.businessinsider.com/fema...-combat-2020-6

*A US Air Force F-35A pilot recently became the first woman to fly the
fifth-generation stealth fighter into combat, according to an Air Force press
release.

*Capt. Emily Thompson, call sign "Banzai," made the historic flight in a
fifth-generation F-35A Lightning II Joint Strike Fighter. It was her first
combat sortie on her first deployment.

*"Being the first female, it's a pretty big honor," Thompson said this week in
an Air Force statement.

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

Deployed to Al Dhafra Air Base in the United Arab Emirates, Capt. Emily
Thompson, callsign "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 simply 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."

The US took the advanced fighter jet into battle for the first time a few months
later, in September 2018, using a Marine Corps F-35B launched from the
amphibious assault ship USS Essex to strike Taliban targets in Afghanistan. US
Air Force F-35As flew their first combat missions against ISIS in Iraq in April
2019.

The Air Force did not respond to requests for additional details on Thompson's
historic flight.



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