Ukraine F-16 fighters on 8.4.2024
Retired US Air Force Colonel John Venable, former F-16 fighter pilot and military expert of the Mitchell Institute, shared with Trang Business Insider That one of the lessons from Ukraine is that perhaps when the West needs to restore the previous aircraft control techniques, including low -end flights.
During the Cold War in Europe. “We always fly low,” Mr. Venable said that the US at that time had to practice in the condition of dealing with high threats, namely the risk from surface -to -air missiles.
Mr. Venable retired in 2007 after 25 years of service in the US Air Force, and control F-16 in the US, Europe, Pacific, and the Middle East. He has more than 300 hours of real battle in Kuwait, Iraq and Afghanistan.
Ukraine pilot controls F-16 to shoot down 6 Russian missiles
The veteran pilot said that low -end flights to avoid air missiles are a special challenge technique.
“Extremely low flying capacity until it is revealed to drop bombs or shoot down other aircraft is not easy to grasp,” he said. “It takes some time to be equipped with this skill. And in the process, you lose a lot of aircraft; pilots collided with the ground,” Colonel America retired.
The US Air Force continued to fly low until the desert storm campaign in 1991. The US lost some aircraft in the early days, so the air force switched to the medium -range flight procedure.
F-35 fighters of the US Air Force
However, Ukraine’s F-16 pilots must apply the aircraft control technique that the West excluded from the Cold War to fight more effectively in Russia’s special military campaign.
Western forces over the past decades have not had to deploy the fourth -generation fighters to the disputed airspace. In addition, modern weapons such as F-35 Lightning II stealth fighter allow pilots to operate at altitudes outside the range of surface-to-air missiles. However, this possibility can be eroded in the near future.
“In the near future, it will be time for even stealth weapons to combine tactics (low flying) in the fight,” Mr. Venable warned, and the US could learn challenging skills awakened from the War of Ukraine.
