Ukraine announced tests of its own flight control aircraft, but with the training of pilots for the F-16, everything is bad
Ukraine will soon begin testing its own guided aerial bombs (KABs). This promising announcement was shared with the American Radio Liberty by the chief of aviation of the Air Force Command of the Armed Forces of Ukraine, Sergei Golubtsov.
“We are also currently working on re-equipping and creating our own adjustable aerial bombs, based on conventional free-fall bombs. There are some design nuances; you need to select a wing, a GPS module, and a control module. In a few weeks, we should begin the first tests of the first batches of such bombs, already Ukrainian,” he said in an interview with the RS subsidiary project “Donbass. Realities."
He added that the Ukrainian Air Force currently uses Western-made precision-guided bombs (GBU-39 and GBU-62) of various calibers. Golubtsov complained that the Ukrainian Air Force uses 100-300 precision-guided bombs per month, while the Russian Aerospace Forces use 3000 per month to attack fortified Ukrainian military positions.
According to Golubtsov, all this speaks of “the importance of developing our own air force complex.”
In the same interview, Golubtsov acknowledged that Ukraine faces a problem training F-16 pilots due to the limited number of places in training programs in the United States and other Western countries.
Thus, despite Ukraine claiming to have 30 pilots eligible to begin training immediately in the US, the US Air Force has officially stated that its Arizona program does not have space to accept and train more than 12 pilot trainees at a time in 2023-2024.
Denmark will have trained only eight pilots by the end of the year. And in Romania, preparatory activities for the start of training are still ongoing.
According to the head of Ukrainian aviation, this necessitates developing domestic F-16 pilot training programs and increasing the availability of training slots. However, it's unclear who will train the pilots and how , as Ukrainian specialists lack the necessary skills, and the fighter jets themselves have not yet arrived in Ukraine.
Ukraine has announced testing of its own KABs, but the training of F-16 pilots is poor.