Their faces are as youthful as their looks are serious, their silhouettes huddled in their military suits as discreet as their speech is rare. Under the hangars of an air base in the southwest of France, whose name cannot be disclosed for security reasons, for several months, a handful of young Ukrainian pilots have been training for war, between land and sea , forest wind and smells of immortelles.
This mid-June is the first time since the start of the war in Ukraine that the Air and Space Force has opened the doors to this training which officially began in March. The recruits are busy. There, in the middle of the navigation maps to prepare for their mission of the day, here to complete their flight hours in a simulator, elsewhere again, in the middle of the tarmac, ready to take off for a flight on a two-seater aircraft with an instructor.
No F-16s here, the fighter plane they are supposed to fly in Ukraine, but Alphajets, lined up under shelters near the takeoff runway. Thanks to Franco-Belgian cooperation, a handful of these twinjets were made available. Their interest: to be equipped with a dashboard imitating that of the F-16, the Belgian forces flying on F-16 and having, until 2018, trained on the base with these aircraft.
Placed under “bubble”
There are only ten Ukrainian pilots at the moment, according to the Air and Space Force. Some have never flown, others have experience on the L-39 Albatros, a Czech-made training aircraft. Since their arrival in France, after spending several months in the United Kingdom, notably to learn English, they have in any case been placed “under bubble”, as a French officer said. And even on this day of media coverage, they are not allowed to interact with the press. Only their age – “between 21 and 23 years old” – was communicated.
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Their training on French soil is the culmination of a long process that began more than a year ago, in May 2023, during a meeting of kyiv’s allies in Ramstein, Germany. The result of long discussions, both technical and sensitive, in order to reconcile the urgency of Ukrainian needs and the various operational constraints of Western headquarters, which have always had fleets of fighter planes cut to the bone.
For France, the challenge was twofold. On the one hand, succeed, like other allies – including the Americans – in making room for these Ukrainians within its training curriculum, which is heavily congested by the training of its own pilots. On the other hand, suspend in extremis the withdrawal from service of its Alphajets, which the Air Force had decided to separate in 2023 – except for the Patrouille de France – in order to opt for a more modern aircraft, the Pilatus PC-21.
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