For the first time, an all-female team will be at the controls this year for the traditional military flyover before the Super Bowl, the apex of the football year.
The trailblazing moment at the sport showcase event will commemorate 50 years of female US navy aviators.
The pilots this Sunday, all navy lieutenants, will fill the cockpits of the four jets that will fly in a diamond formation over the State Farm stadium in Glendale, Arizona, at the conclusion of the national anthem just before the game begins.
And in further recognition of the milestone, the service says the planes are also maintained by mostly female crews on the ground, five decades after the first eight women entered the navy’s flight school in Pensacola, Florida. Six graduated a year later, their achievement chronicled in the 2021 book Wings of Gold.
“It’s not a feeling I can even put into words, I am humbled and honored. It doesn’t get bigger than the Super Bowl,” said Lt Kathryn Martinez of Springfield, Virginia, the daughter of a navy flight officer. Martinez is based at California’s Lemoore naval air station and will fly one of the two F/A-18 Super Hornets in the formation.
She told Fox26 News: “It’s really neat to be able to go out there with a whole division of female aviators and female aviators on the ground as well.”
The two other jets in the flyover will be an F-35C Lightning II stealth fighter, piloted by Lt Jacqueline Drew of Waltham, Massachusetts, and an EA-18 Growler, a variant of the Super Hornet used for electronic jamming.
The other pilots and crew members are lieutenants Arielle Ash, of Abilene, Texas; Margaret Dente, of North Salem, New York; Caitie Perkowski, of Albuquerque, New Mexico; Lindsay Evans, of Palmdale, California; Saree Moreno, of Tampa, Florida; Naomi Ngalle, of Springfield, Virginia; and Suzelle Thomas of Birmingham, Alabama.
Although the aviators will be able to watch the game after landing at Glendale’s Luke air force base, none of them, nor any of their support crews, listed the competing Kansas City Chiefs or Philadelphia Eagles as their favorite NFL teams in their biographies released by the navy.
The service’s first all-female flyover took place in Tennessee in 2019 at the funeral of Capt Rosemary Mariner, the first woman to fly a navy jet.
