Ukraine May be Unable to Use More than 10 Western Supplied F-16s in 2024. The New York Times said on Monday that Ukraine only has about 20 pilots sufficiently trained to fly the aircraft that are being provided this year.
https://www.kyivpost.com/post/36921
by MaryADraper
17 comments
So they can’t train more? Aren’t there more going through training now?
I also think the message that two pilots are required per aircraft is false, or a bad translation.
How is that possible. I hope that some Polish,Danish and Norwegian pilots join the foreign legion until Ukraine establishes a pilot pipeline.
Where are the foreign volunteers?
All I can say is not to under estimate ukraine’s resolve in this situation. I bet there’s more than 20 available pilots for the F16 program
We didn’t have to give them F16s at the start of the war. But we sure as shit should’ve started training pilots and ground crew on the F16 platform within 6 months of the invasion. Biden’s weapon reluctance with Ukraine cost them dearly.
I think there are a lot of pilots in the pipeline. Several countries are training pilots.
They should have been trained a year ago shame on NATO
20 is better than the 6 to 8 the F16 project started with. Sufficient English level was the bottleneck in order to train pilots. Yes the foto is the wrong plane. 10 operational will be a more than welcome (and rather late) way to plug the gaps in the air-defense.
You know what these dozens of pledged F16s are going to be excellent for? A bargaining chip. Putin won’t quit unless he can claim some sort of victory, and getting Ukraine to give up dozens of F16s it can’t effectively use anyway sounds a lot like “look, we successfully demilitarized Ukraine!”
Two weeks ago it was only 6 pilots, so there we go I guess… still way too low number. Ramp up the support and training already, please!
This info could also be misinformation to mislead the Russians on how many F-16s are operational.
From open sources, the Russians already have a lot of information on the F-16s and all of their weapons, including, but not limited to the fancy helmets that the pilots are using.
Slava Ukraini! 🇺🇦
Nothing brings in the casual observers and ignorant comments quite like one of these threads. Here’s the reality from someone with an actual professional backgound in this;
What Ukraine and NATO have done is nothing short of unprecedented and a miracle. No other country has adopted a brand new fighter and put it into combat within less than a year in the past 40 years. They’ve managed to condense a multi-year training program, and a half decade long procurement program into this short amount of time. There are going to be more pilots in the pipeline, but they need to train them enough so that they not only can fly the plane and use every weapon that NATO could equip them with, but also train them to combat-ready level so that they can stay alive in the first conventional air war in Europe since WWII, and the largest anywhere since Iran-Iraq in the 80s or Desert Storm. Their pool of qualified applicants was very likely the challenge, NOT the constraints of NATO. They had to have pilots that had already completed basic jet training and spoke English, which was likely going to be a very small number. More are coming, but this is who they could grab a year ago on short notice
What about contractors? I bet their are some former f 16 pilots who would love to shove some bombs up Russias’ ass!
And don’t give me that escalation bull shit! Russia was flying migs during Vietnam, and you never heard America crying about it or threatening nuclear war. So suck it up, Russia!
So, Is there some where I can place a bit on the 1st target ?
F16s have 17 maintenance hours per flight hour, in war time these things fly a lot. With around 60 planes planned there will probably still be pilots hanging around bored because there are no planes available.
Can they turn these F16s into drones in an effort to reduce casualties, if training pilots is the main issue?
Ukraine: Trains 20 F-16 pilots in record time.
New York Times: “Why this is good for Russia.”