Whenever Major Nah Jinping needs to explain what exactly she does for a living, she would direct curious inquirers to Tom Cruise, and, more specifically, the Top Gun movies.

“That kind of makes my job sound really cool,” Maj Nah tells 8days.sg over Zoom, with a laugh.

Maj Nah, 36, is with the Republic of Singapore Air Force, where she first joined as a pilot trainee in 2006 and went on to become the first F-15SG female pilot in 2013. She’s currently a deputy director in the Defence Psychology Department.

While Maj Nah praises Top Gun’s authentical depiction of aviators and aerial warfare, she does have issues with a few scenes.

“I couldn’t stand that all the pilots and aircrew were like really hot and really good-looking,” she says. “They had, like, the perfect beach body!”

So how do the RSAF pilots look in real life? “Not all of them have six packs and have perfect hair all the time,” she says, jokingly. “They’re just normal!”

That said, the movies are not always the best combat aviation-primer for some folks of a certain age, like Maj Nah and her Spanish husband's two-year-old daughter.

This is where her children’s picture book Wings on Our Own might come in handy.

The book is one of the many community-engaging initiatives to mark the RSAF’s 55th anniversary this year. Other activities include an Open House at Paya Lebar Airbase this weekend (Sept 9-10). 

Danger zone: Maj Nah, whose call sign is ‘Flame’, posing in front of an F-15SG, which will be on Static Display at the RSAF55 Open House. How did Maj Nah get her call sign? “We don’t tell those stories,”she says. “You have to join me at the mess one day for you to figure it out.”

“I personally hope that [the children] would be educated on what we do,” she says. “And I hope they keep the book with them for a long time. I mean, it’s like my baby.”

Maj Nah is no stranger to writing children’s books; her first, Little Girl to Warrior, was published three-and-a-half years ago. “I was stuck at the airport, and I had a lot of time on my hands,” she recalls. “Back then, I wasn’t married, I was like, ‘Okay, I’m going to write my story or my life experience in a children’s book for my future child’.”

“I think my maternal instincts are quite strong and I wanted to have kids,” she adds. “It started out as a letter to my future child, and then it evolved into a children’s book.”

How much does the little one know about mummy’s work? To answer that, Maj Nah shares an anecdote that happened on her squadron’s Family Day.

“I was really excited to [show her the F-15SGs] because I would get to tell her, ‘Oh, mummy flies that!’” she says.

“She’s still in this phase where everybody’s an uncle or auntie, and when she saw the people in flight suits were all men, she went, ‘Uncle, take off’. I’m, like, okay, can auntie take off? She said, no. Then I showed her photos on my phone, ‘Hey, you see this — mama in an aircraft. Mama can fly! Can auntie take off?’. She replied, ‘No mama’. I’m like, okay, good, at least I got the mama part there. I guess my answer to your question is no, she doesn’t really have an idea.”

The Write Stuff: The two children's books written by Maj Nah, who has plans to pen another one. 

Ultimately, the movies and the books are like trailers — they don’t convey the full picture.

“The profession itself is not just about the coolness,” Maj Nah explains. “There was a lot of hard work and hardship going through the entire process.”

“When you’re taking a driving test, if you bump into a curb and fail, you just book another test and carry on, right? But you can’t really do that in flying training,” she says. “Because every flight you’re required to master certain skills. For me, every flight was like taking the A-level exams.”

In retrospect, what advice would Maj Nah give to her younger self (like circa 2016 when she appeared in an International Women’s Day episode of the Mediacorp programme, Not the 5 Show)?

“I think I'll tell her to seek out mentors and friends,” she says, after pondering for a while. “When I look back, my journey was a bit lonely, just being like a female and then having this perception, ‘Oh, you know, I have to be one of the boys, and just be like them.’ And girls are a bit more emotional. Actually, when I failed my flight, I just went into the toilet and just cried there, you know? But I just kept it all to myself, mainly because I didn't want to show them any weakness.”

These days, Maj Nah finds herself in a position to inspire other female RSAF personnel. “As I was going through my journey, there were already girls [whom I met at recruitment talks] who looked up to me, but I didn’t feel like I was worthy or capable of being a role model because I haven’t reached [a certain level of proficiency],” she says.

“Now that I’ve reached there, I have a child, I’m comfortable in my own skin, I increasingly see myself being a role model. I have girls texting me, saying ‘Thank you for the talk’ and that I’m an inspiration to them. I feel like it’s an obligation to be somebody they can look up to and let them know that if they try hard enough, these gender stereotypes don’t matter.”

By the way, what’s one memory that really sticks with Major Nah every time she’s up in the air?

“Cloud surfing,” she says. “I don't really know what other people call it. When you are on a commercial flight and the plane is gradually rising above the clouds? When I'm in a jet, I actually enjoy flying just above the clouds, you know, it's like surfing. It’s quite surreal.”

The RSAF55 Open House is free and open to all members of the public on Sep 9-10 at Paya Lebar Air Base, from 9am to 6pm; doors will open from 8.30am for visitors to view the RSAF assets at the Static Display area. For more info, click here. The public can earn digital coins via the RSAF550H website to exchange for a physical copy of Wings of My Own; alternatively, they can download the digital copy here.