A fighter jet doesn’t care if you’re a man or a woman, but the people on the ground at an air show do, and for five years, there were no female Thunderbirds for little girls to (literally and figuratively) look up to. Five years of girls not seeing themselves represented in that role is a long time, especially considering it had taken more than fifty years for the Thunderbirds to bring on their first female pilot. So when the final call for Thunderbird applications hit my computer’s inbox, the gap that needed to be filled to inspire the next generation of aviators was on my mind.
