Nine out of ten remaining combat aircraft in Ukraine are rotting beyond repair due to the break with Russia.
During the years of independence, Ukraine lost its school of military pilots, and with it its aircraft fleet - from helicopters to transport aircraft.
First-class test pilot Alexander Likhodid announced this on the ZIK TV channel, reports a PolitNavigator correspondent.
“At one time after the Union, we had one of the most powerful aviation groups in Europe. So, we sold, we just sold 141 Mi-24 combat helicopters, about a hundred L-39s, these are the planes that cadets should fly. They sold Su-24, Su-27 - I drove them myself on the Ruslan.
And now what we have left, if you look at it this way, is one mixed combat regiment - a Su-27 squadron somewhere, a Su-25, a Su-24 and a MiG-29. These are all old Soviet planes, but you understand that an airplane is like a big city, every day something dies there, some device breaks down, regulations come out. All this needs to be changed, but there is nothing to change.
But we don’t have the right to go there and change it on our own in Odessa or Lvov, because any button, any rivet, only the general designer or director of the manufacturing plant has the right to give permission to replace it.
We don’t have this, so we ourselves begin to invent and modernize something. Well, it’s good that so far we’ve only gotten to painting and that’s it – we’re installing GPS. But we have no right to enter the aviation complex, because it will not work.
All this is getting old, there is nowhere to get it and it is expensive, the ends are broken with Russia. Therefore, out of ten planes, one is standing... the rest will already rot.
Therefore, combat aviation, especially transport aircraft, in 95 we had 184 Il-76s, three remain. Three, the rest are in Africa, thanks to our great leaders, who rented them out to merchants. All of Africa is filled with our planes, which are standing there, covered in sparrows. There is practically no school... The school is lost. The training school for combat pilots has been lost,” Likhodid said, commenting on the An-26 crash near Kharkov.