New Delhi: Sub-Lieutenant Shivangi became the first Indian woman pilot to join the Indian Navy as she took charge of operational duties at Kochi Naval Base on Monday.

Shivangi hails from Muzaffarpur city of Bihar. She was commissioned in the Indian Navy in 2018, after her initial training. She will be flying the Dornier surveillance aircraft of the Indian Navy, news agency ANI said in a tweet.

Shivani is a Mechanical Engineering graduate from the Sikkim-Manipal Institute of Technology. She cleared the Service Selection Board (SSB) at Bhopal but failed to get a call due to fewer vacancies. Later, while pursuing her M Tech at the Malaviya National Institute of Technology, Jaipur, she attended another SSB in Bengaluru and made the cut in 2018. After a six-month-long Naval Orientation course at the Indian Naval Academy at Ezhimala, she spent another six months getting the hang of flying on a Pilatus basic trainer at the Air Force Academy (AFA).