On Sunday, the Super Bowl will start with a team made up of only women.
By Kayna Whitworth, Lissette Rodriguez, and Katie Kindelan via logo on February 9, 2023, 10:45 p.m.
2:37: Female Navy pilots will fly over the Super Bowl in a historic move.
Female Navy pilots will fly over the Super Bowl in a first-of-its-kind move.
All of the Navy jets that fly over the stadium before the game will be flown by women for the first time ever.
A group of women will make history on Super Bowl Sunday.
Before Sunday’s game between the Philadelphia Eagles and the Kansas City Chiefs at Phoenix’s State Farm Stadium, an all-female team of pilots will do a flyover.
The four female pilots who will be in charge of the diamond formation will be honoring the fact that women have been flying in the U.S. Navy for 50 years.
Navy Lt. Catie Perkowski, one of the four pilots, told “Good Morning America” that being chosen to fly the flyover “felt like a dream.”
Navy Lieutenant Suzelle Thomas said, “I couldn’t believe it.”
PHOTO: Lt. Caitie Perkowski and Lt. Suzelle Thomas are part of an all-female Navy team that did the flyover at Super Bowl LVII in Phoenix.
Lt. Caitie Perkowski and Lt. Suzelle Thomas are part of an all-female Navy team that will do the flyover at Super Bowl LVII in Phoenix.
Lissette Rodriguez/ABC News
On Sunday, Thomas will fly an F-35C, which is the Navy’s newest plane. She has already made history by being the first woman to be able to fly the plane without first learning to fly other jets.
Perkowski will be in charge of the plane at the back of the formation on Sunday as they fly over State Farm Stadium at about 345 miles per hour, a job she called “any pilot’s dream.”
She told her dad directly, “My dad did ask me to call him from the sideline during the Super Bowl.” She said, “I’ll do my best.”
Perkowski continued, “But as an NFL fan, when I got the call to do the Super Bowl flyover, it was almost like a dream at first.”
For the first time in history, the Super Bowl flyover will be led by a team of only women.
For the first time in history, the Super Bowl flyover will be led by a team of only women.
Lissette Rodriguez/ABC News
Perkowski has spent most of her time in the military flying on and off a 100,000-ton aircraft carrier that mostly works in the Indo-Pacific Region, which includes the South China Sea. She says that her gender doesn’t matter there.
“The bottom line is that we trained together to do this job,” she said. “I didn’t join the Navy so I could fly fighter planes as a woman. I joined the Navy and became a fighter pilot, so it doesn’t matter to me.”
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Perkowski and Thomas will fly with other women pilots and Naval Officers in jets that are mostly taken care of by women. The flyover on Sunday will pay special tribute to Capt. Rosemary Mariner, the Navy’s first female jet pilot, and all the women who came before her.
For the first time in history, the Super Bowl flyover will be led by a team of only women.
For the first time in history, the Super Bowl flyover will be led by a team of only women.
Lissette Rodriguez/ABC News
Mariner died in 2019 at the age of 65. At her funeral service in Maynardville, Tennessee, the Navy did its first-ever flyover with only women.
Perkowski said of Mariner, “It was amazing how much wisdom she had to share.” “It’s a real honor to be able to speak for people like her who came before us and made everything we do possible.”
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Both Perkowski and Thomas said that during the flyover, they will also honor every man and woman in the military.