Singapore Airlines hired its first female pilots, though they aren’t flying yet; they’ll need to undergo two to three years of training before being rostered among the company’s 2,000 pilots for commercial flights. The airline doesn’t have targets for the number of women to be hired. “We will recruit whoever is the most qualified,” Nicholas Ionides, spokesman, Singapore Airlines, was quoted in The Straits Times. SIA is behind its competitors on hiring female pilots; virtually all other major carriers have already done so. However, among Singapore carriers, women make up fewer than 1 percent of the total pilot population. For Singapore Airlines, that number is now 0.1 percent. That’s lower than the global figure of 5 percent, according to the International Society of Women Airline Pilots. So which country has the most female pilots? That honor goes to Indian airlines, with almost 600 women among its 5,050 pilots — bringing that number to 11.6 percent. In March, an all-women Air India crew operated the world’s largest continuous flight — from Delhi (DEL) to San Francisco (SFO) — in honor of International Women’s Day.