The U.S. Navy’s Blue Angels selected its first female jet pilot for the upcoming 2023 season, the famed demonstration squadron announced Monday.
Lt. Amanda Lee was named as one of two F/A-18E/F Super Hornet pilots selected for the season, alongside an events coordinator, a C-130J Super Hercules pilot, an aviation maintenance officer, and a flight surgeon. They were selected to replace the six outgoing team members.
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“We had an overwhelming number of applicants from all over the globe this year,” Capt. Brian Kesselring, flight leader and commanding officer of the Blue Angels, said in a press release. “We look forward to training our fantastic new team members, passing on the torch, and watching the incredible things this team will accomplish in 2023.”
Although Lee is the first woman selected to fly a fighter jet on the team, other women have served on the team in other capacities for 55 years, according to the press release. Lee currently flies the F/A-18F Super Hornet fighter jet at Naval Air Station Oceana in Virginia Beach, Virginia.
The Blue Angels’s first female pilot in general, Marine Maj. Katie Cook, said she was ecstatic that another female pilot was joining the ranks. Cook, who is now in the Marine Corps Reserve, was a pilot of a KC-130 logistical plane and was inducted into the elite squad in 2015.
“There’s a lot of little girls and little boys out there that didn’t know that women could be pilots, could be Marines, could be Blue Angel pilots,” Cook told the Wall Street Journal. “There’s a long legacy of women, first in naval aviation before us, and so we would never even have this opportunity without them.”
Women have flown military planes since World War II when the Navy created the Women Accepted for Volunteer Emergency Service division in 1942. Women during the war were allowed to maintain aircrafts, test parachutes, and helped train men in navigation and gunnery skills, according to an article for the National Air and Space Museum.
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Training for the new Blue Angels team members will begin in September during a two-month turn over perid, before launching into a rigorous five month training program in Pensacola, Florida, and a Naval Air Facility in El Centro, California in November, the press release said.
The new season will begin in March. The pilots are currently scheduled to fly in 33 airshows around the United States and Canada so far, according to the Wall Street Journal.
