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Her name is Avani Chaturvedi. In all the years the Indian Air Force had existed, no Indian woman had ever flown a fighter jet into the sky alone. She was the first. She grew up in a small town in Madhya Pradesh, the daughter of a government engineer. Her elder brother joined the army, and watching him, she decided she did not just want to serve the country. She wanted to fly for it. At the time, that dream had a wall around it. The fighter cockpit, the fast jets, the whole combat stream, all of it was closed to women in India. No matter how good she was, the door said men only. Then in 2015, the country finally opened the fighter stream to women. Avani and two other young women, Bhawana Kanth and Mohana Singh, walked through that door first. In June 2016 they became the first women fighter pilots India had ever commissioned. But flying with an instructor beside you is one thing. Flying a fighter jet completely alone, with no one to take the controls if something goes wrong, is another. On 19 February 2018, Avani Chaturvedi climbed into a MiG 21 Bison, one of the fastest and most unforgiving jets in the fleet, a machine that has killed many experienced pilots. She took off from Jamnagar on her own. For about thirty minutes she owned the sky. Then she brought it down safely. With that one flight, she became the first Indian woman to fly a fighter jet solo. When people asked her what it felt like to do it as a woman, her answer was simple. The machine does not know if the pilot is a man or a woman. It only knows who can fly. The girl from a small town who was once told the cockpit was not for her now writes her name across the sky at the speed of sound.