Meet Hill Air Force Base’s first female fighter wing commander
Colonel. Regina Sabric is the new commander of Hill Air Force Base's 419th Fighter Wing. Sabric is the first female commander in the over 60 year history of the wing. Wednesday, Oct. 24, 2018.
Colonel. Regina Sabric is the new commander of Hill Air Force Base's 419th Fighter Wing. Sabric is the first female commander in the over 60 year history of the wing. Wednesday, Oct. 24, 2018.
Col. Gina "Torch" Sabric, commander of the 419th Fighter Wing at Hill Air Force Base, Utah, and the Air Force Reserve's first female F-35 pilot. (U.S. Air Force photo/Todd Cromar)
HILL AIR FORCE BASE — When Col. Regina Sabric was a young girl, around 10 or 12 years old, she had an epiphany.
She knew exactly what she wanted to do with her life. She wanted to be a fighter pilot.
“My dad took me to an air show when I was little,” Sabric said. “I remember looking up and wanting to fly, and to me, being a fighter pilot was the pinnacle of flying. It was definitely an ‘a-ha’ kind of moment.”
Sabric’s childhood dream became a reality shortly after she entered the Air Force as a graduate of Officer Training School in 1996.
Since then, Sabric has accumulated more than 22 years of flying experience, serving as an F-16 flight examiner, an F-16 and MQ-9 instructor pilot, a C-146A aircraft commander and more. She’s flown combat support missions in Operations Allied Force and Enduring Freedom and has served multiple times in Operations Iraqi Freedom and Noble Eagle.
Today she serves as commander of Hill Air Force Base’s 419th Fighter Wing — the first female commander in the 60-plus-year history of the reserve wing. She’s also the Air Force Reserve’s first female F-35 pilot.
When the New York-born, Pennsylvania-raised Sabric was dreaming of patrolling the skies, it was an aspiration that hadn’t yet been realized by any women in America. The Air Force’s first female fighter pilot, Jeannie Marie Leavitt, didn’t begin flying in the F-16 until 1993.
Sabric, 44, says she’s proud of the history she’s made in her new wing and with the reserve, but isn’t particularly fond of waxing poetic about it.
“It’s tricky for me to be highlighted that way because we fight so hard to say gender doesn’t matter,” Sabric said Wednesday from her 419th headquarters office. “But I am proud of it because when I was growing up, you would have never seen a woman sitting behind this desk. But generally, I’m not a huge fan of highlighting the gender piece, other than I know it means a lot to little girls to see a woman coming out of the cockpit.”
Sabric officially took command of the 419th in April, but immediately left for F-35 training at Eglin Air Force Base in Florida. She became fully qualified on the F-35 in August and typically flies about twice a week.
Pilots and maintainers at Hill operate the Air Force’s first combat fleet of F-35s. The base was selected as the service’s preferred home for the jet in December 2013 after a four-year environmental review process.
Since the initial delivery of the first two jets in late 2015, the base has been accepting one to two F-35s every month. Once the full fleet of 78 Lightning IIs is complete, expected sometime in 2019, the planes will be divided among three active-duty fighter squadrons and one reserve squadron.
Sabric says bringing the fighter squadrons to full operational capability will be one of her wing’s largest and most immediate challenges.
“Within the next year, we’ll get all of our jets and we’ll be the first operational wing in the Air Force,” she said. “We’re kind of setting the playbook for all the future F-35 ops in the Air Force. A lot of the lessons learned here, a lot of the groundbreaking stuff will be passed on to the Air Force units behind us.”
As commander of the 419th, Sabric oversees more than 1,200 personnel, most of which are part-time reservists. In addition to pilots and maintainers associated with the F-35, the wing also provides a full-spectrum mission support function with medical personnel, firefighters, security forces, aerial port, civil engineers, logistics, and explosive ordnance disposal personnel.
