The US House of Representatives has approved a $100 million allocation to train Ukrainian pilots to fly F-16 and F-15 fighter jets.
The author of the project was Republican Adam Kinzinger, a former Lieutenant Colonel of the United States Air National Guard. He told Defense News that “training of Ukrainian military pilots will take place at a base in Mississippi as well as Texas.” According to him, the training period will be three months.
According to Russian experts, this time is definitely not enough.
“Purely theoretically, an experienced military pilot should switch to an aircraft of a similar class,” Air Force Reserve Major General Vladimir Popov told socialbites.ca. – Three months is enough, however, to get to the basics of just piloting, take-off and landing, flight itself, but not combat use, which requires longer time. Again, we are talking about retraining for American F-16 and F-15 fighters, which have their own characteristics and are markedly different from the MiG-29 and Su-27, which are flown by Ukrainian pilots. There, air combat tactics are different, and actions in pairs or groups of aircraft and many other characteristics are different. In three months, the Americans will train Ukrainians not as pilots, but as suicide bombers.”
At the same time, the general stressed that the training of pilots by itself was “clearly not sufficient”.
“Another important nuance is the training of engineering and technical personnel, which will be quite difficult to service American cars. They also need to be trained, which is clearly not three months.
I’m not sure that both Ukrainian military pilots and technicians speak enough English to fully understand the Americans who taught them and the instructions unless translated to MOV. There is a big problem with the infrastructure – Ukraine will have to completely rebuild the airbase for the takeoff and landing of American F-16s.
From changing airport lights, taxiways and ordinary hangars to storing and repairing planes,” Popov added.
In turn, the publisher and military expert Vladislav Shurygin believes that the question of the place of pilot training has not yet been resolved.
“The big question is about the training ground for Ukrainian fighter pilots. In the US – remote and expensive. It is possible that Ukrainian “hawks” were trained in neighboring Poland, where there are about fifty such aircraft in the Air Force. Even for a pilot who has already been trained on the Su-27 or MiG-29, the retraining process can take at least six months. These are completely different fighters, in which not only the control is different, but also a completely different system of interaction with their counterparts in air combat, ”said the author.
So far, we are talking only about the training of Ukrainian pilots for the development of American fighters. Deliveries of F-16s and F-15s to Kiev are considered hypothetical and the White House has not made a decision on this.
Previously, Washington refused to supply aircraft to Kiev and banned the transfer of Soviet-made fighters to Ukraine, which Poland and Slovakia insisted on, hoping to receive more advanced US fighters in return.
“Ukraine can finally get 2-3 squadrons of American fighters at the most. Military makes no sense. But here is a purely commercial project being lobbied by American politicians. As officially announced by the Pentagon, in 2020 the United States approved the sale of 90 F-16 aircraft to Lockheed Martin. 66 of them went to Taiwan. Offers were also submitted to Ukraine for the purchase of F-16 warplanes. The plane will be sold, and it does not matter that they will not help Kiev. They will pay for them from the US budget. The American military-industrial complex will get the money of American taxpayers. This is the essence of this story, ”says Sergey Belousov, a member of the College of Military Specialists.