Air Force inducts first four female pilots

Risalpur: With ceremonial pomp and aerial acrobatics, Pakistan yesterday welcomed the first four female pilots into its air force at a grand parade watched by the Islamic nation's No 2 general.

Saba Khan, Nadia Gul, Mariam Khalil and Saira Batool were among 36 aviation cadets who received their wings after 3 1/2 years of intensive training, breaking into an all-male bastion of Pakistan's armed forces.

"I want to fly fighter jets and prove that girls can equally serve our country in the best possible manner as men are doing," Flying Officer Gul, 22, said after graduating from the air force's elite training academy in the northwestern town of Risalpur.

General Ahsan Saleem Hyat, vice chief of army staff, said the four had "shown the spirit and courage to rise above the ordinary and break new ground for others to emulate". "If Pakistan is to rise to the height that it deserves ... both men and women of our beloved land must find equal space and opportunity," he said.

Carrying rifles and dressed in the same blue uniform as their male colleagues except for a kameez (tunic) flapping over their navy blue trousers, and one wearing a headscarf they paraded before hundreds of family members and diplomats, and took the military oath.

Standing in front of a T-37 training jet, Batool described her training as tough but "very thrilling". "My parents, their prayers and my instructors and above all, almighty Allah, helped me achieve this success," said Batool, who wore green pilot overalls.

Two other women along with nine male cadets dropped out of the same training course because of air sickness and slow progress. They now work in ground branches of the air force.

The four women are the first female pilots in the 58-year-history of the Pakistan air force. They trained in MFI-17 Super Mushfhak and T-37 jets, and depending on their abilities and the needs of the air force could go on to fly fighter jets.

Three more women are due to get their wings in October, but the air force will see how they perform before deciding whether to induct more female trainees, said Air Cmdr Abid Kwaja, chief of the flight training college.

The women undergo the same training with their male colleagues, but live in separate quarters, and in a concession to religious sensitivities in this conservative Islamic nation, do their physical exercises separately from the men.

"In the initial part of the training we felt they [women] were a little wanting in muscular power, needed to control the aircraft. They were put in the gym and given physical exercises, and within one or two months they came up to physical requirements," said Kwaja. "They are as good as the male cadets."