A-10 to the Ukrainians? Recent comments by the Air Force secretary suggest a way out for the USAF from A-10 ownership

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Up through 1942, Luftwaffe pilots received between 13 and 20 months of training depending on their assignment.

The training time kept being shortened between 1942 through 1944 and by war's end, this was literally down to weeks. Many of these pilots did not survive their first sortie.

The situation in Ukraine is not desperate enough to toss cannon fodder at the Russians - the longer the Ukrainian pilots take to train, the more efficient and effective they will be with their equipment (and this can be said for their ground-pounding counterparts working up with Western AFVs and weapons systems, too).
 
Thanks for sharing. By that article, it appears that as of July 8, 2022 the US had no training planned or in place.

"On training of pilots, there are no current plans to train Ukraine on any air platform other than those that they are using every day effectively in the battle right now," a senior defense official said in response to a question from Air Force Magazine at a July 8 Pentagon briefing."

Of course the Defence Department doesn't want to show all its cards. But this does suggest that from before the invasion to at least July, no training on the F-16 took place. This is what I'm getting at in my posts above, where I ask what's taking so long. I understand that the training, parts/maintenance and preparation phase takes a long time, but why did the US government wait until mid July or later to make a decision on providing F-16s? Had such training begun in, say April or May, would the UAF see the F-16 in Dec?
 
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I really think I understand and share in The Admiral's frustration. I know it takes a while to set everything up and hate that the necessary steps weren't set up sooner. The sooner the forces of Evil are stopped, the better the the world can be. I don't want to get a Shortround6 lecture from FLYBOYJ or Der Eagle but I like to think there's more going on then we know. I like to think it's already happening.
 
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Feb is a realistic goal, although that too might slip its gears a little depending on factors that are hard to foresee.

According to what I've read, the decision to start this training was taken a month ago, but I haven't read anything about its progress or what stage it's in, for obvious reasons.


I was under the perhaps-mistaken impression that this decision had already been taken in the positive. I'll have to go look up what I read a while back to see if I misread; so what I wrote above may be wrong.
 
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Even in our info leaky world, there is always something going on that "we" don't know about. For instance the "red Eagles" at Tonopah and later the F-117 at the same base. One of the main reasons MacNamara wanted to change the aircraft designations was because it was too confusing for the college boys to know if they were voting for money for new planes, new models, or a black program..
 
There is already training of UAF plots going on, hosted in other countries. The US is involved in the training, but is still waiting (I think) on congress for the official OK and funding to engage in the training with a larger footprint.
 
That's something to ask someone in the DoD. I think this is slow process is due to getting approval from congress and a buy in from other allies. Then it's a matter of funding. Even then your timeline for training and deployment under the current conditions is still very wishful.
 
Probably, their training schedule was 40 hours per week or close to that?
 
Dimlee said:
Probably, their training schedule was 40 hours per week or close to that?
Click to expand...

Perhaps. You're right that as reservists they had a lower-intensity training schedule. You may want to counterbalance that with the fact that their understanding of instrumentation was more natural, that they were already used to thinking in English rather than metric readouts, that their trainers were speaking to them in their native tongue, things like that. Learning how a Sidewinder works, learning how to use an infrared pod they have no experience with, all these things take time. For anybody.

I'm not saying anything unwholesome about UAF pilots, who have definitely shown their mustard in the last six months -- and I have no doubt they can and will master these fighting platforms. I'm just saying that a training schedule can only intensify so much before you get holes in the ground, and so gathering flight-hours, experience, and thus confidence in a new and foreign airframe will take time.

The days of Don Blakeslee saying "you can learn to fly it on the way to the target" are long gone. All due respect to A Admiral Beez , this stuff takes a lot of time, because the systems are complex.
 
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