Capt. Amy Lynn Svoboda's promising career as one of 14 female Air Force fighter pilots ended in the night desert amid creosote bushes and Gila monsters.
Svoboda's A-10 attack jet plunged from the night sky while on a training run over a southwestern Arizona range that pilots have used for 56 years to hone bombing, shooting and dogfighting skills.The 29-year-old Illinois resident became the Air Force's first female fighter pilot to die in a crash - and the second casualty in two months among the 355th Wing's A-10 Thunderbolt fliers at Davis-Monthan Air Force Base.
"She went down doing what she wanted to do," base spokesman Capt. Andy White said.
Svoboda was practicing ground attacks Tuesday night, her plane loaded with bombs, when the A-10 went down about 50 miles southwest of Phoenix, near Gila Bend, lighting up the desert with a fireball.
The crash site was found quickly, but searchers had to wait for daylight Wednesday because of the plane's ammunition. There was no sign Svoboda tried to eject or any immediate indication of what caused the crash, Air Force representatives said.
Hundreds of tiny flags marked the sites of debris scattered by the impact, which created a blackened crater 10 feet deep and 50 feet wide.
Svoboda, a 1989 graduate of the Air Force Academy, had gone through pilot training after the secretary of defense lifted a ban in 1993 on women flying combat aircraft.
She became an aircraft instructor pilot before arriving in Davis-Monthan in 1996 for A-10 training. She was made chief of A-10 training for a combat-ready squadron and logged more than 1,400 hours as a jet pilot.
The last A-10 pilot based at Davis-Monthan to die while flying was Capt. Craig Button, 32, whose jet vanished April 2 over the same bombing range. An extensive 18-day search led to the plane's discovery on a snow-covered Colorado mountainside.