US Navy's first black female pilot will receive her Wings of Gold today

For the first time in its 110-year history, the US Navy will present its first black female pilot with her Wings of Gold today.

Lieutenant Madeline Swegle, a Virginia native, celebrated her achievement when she completed her training at the U.S. Naval Academy earlier this month.

In a video released by the Navy ahead of her July 31 ceremony, Swegle said: "I am really honored that I get to wear the wings and get to fly planes and call myself a pilot."

"I don't think the goal in my life is to necessarily be the first at anything. That was never something that I set out to do, it was just something I was interested in and I found out later," she said.

In the video below, Swegle discusses her remarkable achievement: 

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Swegle first decided that she wanted to become a pilot when her parents took her to see the Blue Angels.

"My parents raised me and they told me that I can be whatever I wanted to be. We would go see the Blue Angels when they were in town," she said. "They were just so cool I loved them. I love fast planes."

Swegle said that she was inspired to become a pilot by her early love of fast planes, but found her three years training with a higher-performance aircraft "daunting" as well as thrilling.

"It was crazy to be in such a higher performance aircraft," she said. "I was really excited on the takeoff, like feeling the exhilaration and getting thrown back in the seat a little bit."

Swegle admitted that there were times when she wasn't sure if she'd achieve her Wings of Gold.

"It took a lot of fighting the aircraft to figure out how it was going to perform," she said. "Looking back it's amazing to think about where I started and I had never been in an airplane before so, it's just one step at a time. It's really cool to think of all of the things that I've done now which I'd never thought that I'd be able to do."

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"To show up here at this level, you need to be a top performer and then you have to continue to perform while you're here. These are the best pilots in the world that are trained here, the very best," said Maher. "She, just like all of her fellow Wingees, are at that standard of excellence and they're going to go out and make all of us very proud."

The young woman is now hoping that she will inspire others to follow in her footsteps. "I think the representation is important because we are a very diverse nation," she said in the video.

According to Women in Aviation, this achievement comes four decades after Brenda Robinson also made history when she became the first African-American woman to earn her Wings of Gold.

"I hope that my legacy will be that there will be a lot of other women and minority women and just different faces that come. Be encouraged and know that they have all the tools that they need and follow their dreams," she explained.

The graduation ceremony will be taking place today at the Naval Air Station in Kingsville, Texas.