Exclusive: U.S. could train Ukrainian pilots to fly F-16s in 4 months
Yahoo News has obtained a U.S. Air Force assessment of two Ukrainian pilots who outperformed stated Pentagon expectations over two weeks in a flight simulator at a U.S. air base.
Yahoo News has exclusively obtained an internal U.S. Air Force assessment that concludes it would take only four months to train Ukrainian pilots to operate American-made F-16 fighter jets, a far shorter time frame than what has been repeatedly cited by Pentagon officials.
news.yahoo.com
They are the Ukrainian pilots to have traveled to the U.S. to have their skills evaluated by American military trainers.
www.nbcnews.com
That's why I'm targeting the end of the year for F-16s in Ukraine. My guess is that the first pilots start training in the June-July time frame, both in the USA and some European countries. Meanwhile a plan is put in place to select the exact aircraft, with the exact systems, that the West wants Ukraine to have. Simultaneously, a plan will be formulated to make sure that Ukraine has the proper air defense neccessary to protect the locations that these F-16s will call home when they arrive in Ukraine. Finally, ground crews will be trained Simultaneously, to keep the planes in working order, with U.S. led repair facility stood up, likely in Poland, to perform more complicated maintenance for the aircraft when required (similar to the international Leopard 2 repair facility that has come together in Poland).
All of this will take a while, but plans are likely in place to make it work fairly quickly, when the politicians get out of the way... Which Biden eventually will.
For the record, when I talk about air defense to keep this facility safe, I'm talking about multi-layered defense, that would require the political will power to assign multiple air defense assets to this / these one or two airfields to ensure that Russia doesn't just carpet bomb it in missiles.
We're talking about something like...
1x Patriot Battery: to deal with hypersonic missiles and significant volleys of cruise missiles.
1x NASAMS Battery: to help defense against cruise missiles, as well as S-300 missiles and the like.
1x Iris-T SLM Battery or SAMP-T Battery: to help with defend against cruise missiles, as well as S-300 missiles and the like.
2-3× Avenger or Stormer air defense systems: to help intercept lesser targets such as Shahed Drones and other slower moving aerial targets
2x Kub, Buk, or Hawk air defense systems: serving as a redundancy for the Avengers or Stormers, in case of mass drone attack
1x Skynex or multiple Gepard air defense systems: serving as a redundancy to the redundancy against aerial targets destroyable by air defense.
You basically have to create an Iron Dome of sorts, which means you have to have the political will to do so and likely, additional air defense help committed by your allies.