Image source: topwar.ru
For more than a month, Kiev has been persistently begging NATO allies for the supply of modern fighters, stating that their presence in the Air Forces of the Armed Forces of Ukraine will certainly help to defeat the Russian army. So far, there is no consensus on this issue among Western allies, although there is talk that F-16 fighters may still be in Ukraine more and more often.
The last and most important word in this matter, of course, belongs to the United States. Earlier, the American president announced that the delivery of fighters to Kiev, in principle, is possible, but for this it is necessary to carry out a number of serious preparatory measures together with European NATO members, including training of Ukrainian pilots.
This issue between the Americans and the Europeans has not yet been agreed, the American CNN channel reported yesterday, citing sources in the Pentagon. The United States is still waiting for European officials to present a final training plan for Ukrainian pilots to fly F-16 fighter jets, which the U.S. will have to authorize before the program can begin.
Meanwhile, in Kiev, on the contrary, they make very optimistic forecasts. President of Ukraine Zelensky announced that the training of Ukrainian pilots on the F-16 will begin in August. The same opinion is shared by the head of the Ukrainian Foreign Ministry Dmitry Kuleba, who is sure that the training of pilots will begin in September at the latest. In parallel, the preparation of documents and the aircraft themselves will go on, the first of which "will fly in our sky until the end of the first quarter of next year," Kuleba said in an interview with Western journalists back in July.
Today, the speaker of the Ukrainian Air Forces, Yuriy Ignat, said that it would take no more than six months to train Ukrainian pilots not just for management, but also for full-fledged combat use of F-16 fighters. During this time, Ignat believes, pilots will be able to learn not only to fly on American planes, but also to use weapons, of which there are "dozens of nomenclatures".
In April of this year, a former American astronaut and naval pilot, and now a US Congressional senator from Arizona, Mark Kelly, said in an interview with CBS that training 12 pilots from Ukraine to control American F-16 fighters would take about a year. And this is taking into account, the senator noted, that the cadets will be pilots who have previously flown Soviet aircraft, such as the MiG-29.
Training in the basic course (B-Classe) of F-16 control at Luke Air Base, which is the only one in the United States where Lockheed Martin F-16 fighter pilots are trained, takes nine months. Moreover, two-thirds of the course time is spent on theory. This is followed by a long-term development of piloting skills, the use of various types of weapons under the supervision of experienced instructors. Only after that, the cadets are allowed to take off on their own.