After Western main battle tanks like Leopards and Challengers failed to help Kiev prevail over Russian forces on the battlefield, Ukrainian generals and political leaders now eagerly await the arrival of the next supposed “game changer” weapon – the F-16 fighter jets.
Though the Biden administration has initially been reluctant to provide these military aircrafts to Kiev, last month POTUS announced that the US and its allies will train Ukrainian pilots to operate F-16s, with several NATO members since pledging to supply F-16 aircrafts to Ukraine.
However, even if the F-16s turn out to be as good as advertised, Ukraine’s ability to produce the required number of decent fighter pilots at this point seems rather questionable, famous Russian test pilot Magomed Tolboyev told Sputnik.
During the Soviet era, one had to spend two years “flying” as part of an air force regiment to become a third-class pilot, while becoming a first-class pilot took six to eight years, Tolboyev reminisced.
“You can only become a decent pilot on your eighth year of training and practice,” he explained, noting that Ukraine plans to train their pilots in only six months.
He pointed out that Ukraine currently has only one military flight school, in Kharkov, which is simply not enough to train enough pilots for an adequate air force.
“Ukraine thinks that training pilots is some kind of child’s play. This is going to end badly,” Tolboyev remarked, suggesting that the newly minted Ukrainian pilots would be unlikely to last long in actual combat.
His concerns were echoed by Maj. Gen. Vladimir Popov, a veteran Russian combat aircraft pilot who suggested that Kiev currently suffers from a severe lack of combat pilots due to losses sustained during the Ukrainian conflict.
While the military pilot training program in Ukraine today resembles a crash course---as Kiev seems eager to cut whatever corners it can to get enough people into cockpits---Popov mused that Ukrainian military leadership may start treating their pilots as disposable assets.
“A pilot completes two or three sorties and that’s that. If he gets killed, who cares, as long as the main objective – or perhaps some sort of a political act, for show – was completed,” he said.
According to Popov, Ukrainian leaders do not care if their pilots get killed or are forced to eject after a couple of missions, though such callous attitude results in a distinct lack of volunteers or even draftees for Ukraine’s air force.
Both Tolboyev and Popov also speculated that the arrival of F-16s to Ukraine may be followed by the arrival of foreign pilots who, aside from helping train Ukrainian pilots, may also fly combat missions for Kiev, effectively acting as mercenaries.
Ukraine’s air force has been suffering from the lack of flightworthy aircraft and competent pilots throughout the months following the escalation of the Ukrainian conflict in February 2022.
While the former was somewhat mitigated by cannibalization of the mothballed Soviet-era planes and shipments of the leftover Warsaw pact aircrafts from abroad, replacing the pilots lost on combat missions has become problematic due to the scarcity of the necessary training facilities.
A number of Ukrainian combat pilots have also lost their lives in freak accidents. For example, one of Ukraine’s most decorated and famous combat pilot Andrii Pilshchykov, callsign Juice, perished during a training flight along with two other Ukrainian pilots last month when his aircraft collided with another Ukrainian aircraft.
Another accident, also in August, cost the regime in Kiev six pilots when a pair of Ukrainian Mi-8 military-transport helicopters crashed while attempting a landing. The crash apparently occurred because the pilots of the respective helicopters were spooked by reports of a Russian Su-35 fighter aircraft entering the sector they were in.