Nicole Malachowski was five years old when she watched military jets at an air show and decided that was what she would do with her life. It was a perfectly reasonable ambition, except for one detail nobody mentioned to her at the time. The United States did not allow women to fly combat aircraft.

She became a fighter pilot anyway, then the first woman ever to fly with the Air Force Thunderbirds, then a squadron commander. And then an illness nobody could name took almost all of it away, and she spent the years after that making sure it would happen to fewer people.

She turns 52 today. This is the whole flight.

The Rule She Grew Up Against

By the time she was old enough to apply, women could fly in the Air Force — transports, tankers, trainers. The combat cockpit was closed. She entered the Air Force Academy in 1992 with no guarantee that would ever change, and flew and instructed on the TG-4 glider while she waited to find out.

A year later it did change: in 1993 the ban on women flying combat aircraft was lifted. She graduated fourth in the class of 1996, finished pilot training at Columbus Air Force Base in Mississippi, and went straight to the F-15E Strike Eagle at Seymour Johnson.

What followed was an entirely normal, entirely demanding fighter career. Two tours with the 48th Fighter Wing at RAF Lakenheath in England, where she also met her husband, Paul, an F-15E weapon systems officer. A year in South Korea as an air liaison officer with the Army’s 2nd Infantry Division. And in early 2005, four months deployed for Operation Iraqi Freedom: 26 combat missions, part of more than 188 combat hours overall.

The mission she has called her proudest came during that deployment. She led the first fighter formation to provide security for Iraq’s historic democratic elections in 2005.

The Application She Withdrew

The Thunderbirds had never had a woman in the cockpit, and the first time Malachowski tried to change that, she did not get as far as being turned down. She started an application, took the measure of the reaction around her, and pulled it.

It is worth sitting with that sentence, because it is the exact mechanism by which barriers survive after the rules change. Nobody had to say no. She was made to feel she should not ask.

She asked again. In June 2005 the Air Force announced that she had been selected for the United States Air Force Air Demonstration Squadron, the first woman ever to fly with the team. She converted to the F-16 at Luke Air Force Base and joined the squadron at Nellis in November 2005.

For the 2006 and 2007 seasons she flew Thunderbird 3, the right wing of the diamond, under the callsign FiFi — roughly 140 performances in total. In the tightest formations the jets fly with as little as 18 inches between fuselage and canopy.

1,525 Days

After the Thunderbirds came a White House Fellowship and then the job she has called her highest honour: command of the 333rd Fighter Squadron at Seymour Johnson, an F-15E training squadron. Over her time there it trained more than 200 students to fly the Strike Eagle.

In 2012, while she was in command, she got sick. It started with intractable pain, severe fatigue and trouble thinking and speaking, and over the following years it got worse: disorientation, confusion, anxiety, episodes of temporary paralysis. She and her husband eventually catalogued 63 separate symptoms. At her lowest she was bedridden, needed home health care, and could not speak.

The chances to catch it early came and went. In 2012, according to her account to Military Times, a flight surgeon dismissed a bull’s-eye rash on her hip on the grounds that there was no Lyme disease in North Carolina. In 2013, after an engorged tick was found on her leg, a doctor advised waiting to see whether a rash developed rather than testing.

She told a federal working group on tick-borne disease in December 2017 exactly how long it had taken.

In that period she saw more than twenty doctors, military and civilian, across eight specialties, and received three misdiagnoses. When the answer finally came in 2016 it was not one tick-borne illness but five, including Lyme disease. Treatment at specialist centres in Boston eventually gave her back the ability to stand, to read and to speak. It did not give her back her flying career. At the same hearing she noted that in eighteen days she would be permanently, medically retired. She left the Air Force as a colonel after 21 years.

The Mission After

What she did next is the reason she is in the National Women’s Hall of Fame and not only in the Thunderbirds’ history books.

She became an advocate for tick-borne illness patients, and pushed the military to take the threat seriously. The result was the first tick-borne illness prevention programme deployed across the Air National Guard: more than 100,000 Guardsmen briefed, with more than 100 doctors and over 1,000 medical technicians involved, and an expected minimum of 30 cases prevented every year.

She was inducted into the National Women’s Hall of Fame in 2019. Earlier, in 2010, she had spoken at the Capitol ceremony awarding the Congressional Gold Medal to the Women Airforce Service Pilots of the Second World War, on behalf of all 1,102 of them — with a broken leg, from a wheelchair. In March 2025 her biography briefly disappeared from Air Force websites as part of the removal of diversity-related content; it was restored the following month.

She has said the Thunderbirds taught her that nothing of significance is ever accomplished alone. The five-year-old at the air show would not have known what that meant yet. Happy birthday, FiFi.

Sources: Nicole Malachowski, testimony to the HHS Tick-Borne Disease Working Group, 11 December 2017; Military Times, Former Thunderbirds pilot takes on disease that grounded her career, 2025; Congressionally Directed Medical Research Programs; National Women’s Hall of Fame; Wikipedia and Wikiquote entries for Nicole Malachowski; American Veterans Center