Ukrainian Pilots Being Trained to Fly American A-10 Thunderbolt Aircraft: Reports

The United States has commenced a secret program to train Ukrainian pilots to fly A-10 Thunderbolt II ground attack aircraft in an effort to provide battlefield support to besieged Ukrainian formations.

The TIME magazine reported the existence of a secret training base where Ukrainian pilots were being brought in to speed up their training on handling the A-10s, also known as Warthogs, using make-shift simulators. These simulators were designed with help from open-source YouTube videos of U.S. military trainers in action and built with off-the-shelf components and guidance by retired U.S. military officials.

The facility has been operating since early May. It consists of two rooms with walls covered with photos of the A-10 alongside a couple of posters that said, “Keep calm and kill Soviet tanks.”

Each station had a realistic throttle, flight stick and VR goggles linked up to a computer tower that gave off a technicolor glow. None of the gear was classified, and most of the components came from a niche of the gaming community that builds flight simulators for fun.

The pilots themselves each wore a ski mask under their virtual reality goggles to protect their identities, and it was the pilots who were the primary reason for the secrecy. Ukraine’s Air Force does not have many pilots, and some have been killed in the war over the last few months. It normally takes years to train a pilot, costing the military millions of dollars in jet fuel alone, the report said.

The A-10 is well-designed to attack tanks, but it is vulnerable in contested airspace like that over Ukraine, where Russian jets and anti-aircraft missiles remain active.

While there is no official proposal to transfer A-10s to Ukraine, on July 15, the U.S. Congress adopted a draft of Pentagon’s budget in which it provided $100 million for the training of Ukrainian pilots on F-16 and F-15 types aircraft. U.S. senators have asked the U.S. Defense Department to include F-16 and F-15 aircraft in future military aid packages to Ukraine. The Pentagon reported that it is now conducting research on the prospect of transferring multifunctional aircraft to Ukraine.

“The A-10 is an incredible tank-killing machine,” retired Air Force Gen. Philip Breedlove, former Supreme Allied Commander Europe who is now with the Middle East Institute, tells TIME. But it works best in environments where enemy aircraft and anti-aircraft batteries have been neutralized. “If you were flying for an air force that had a really good capability to do suppression of enemy air defenses, jamming, noise jamming, specific targeting radar jamming, and doing all those things to make the target area more permissive, you might be able to work A-10s into a high threat or a medium threat arena, but the Ukrainians do not have that capability at all,” Breedlove says.

Alexander Gorgan, a Ukrainian infantry officer, wants Ukraine's Air Force to get A-10s to protect troops on the ground. He approached Andrii Vavrysh, an entrepreneur and real-estate developer, to help bankroll the project, buy the VR headsets, replicas of A-10 controls made by online hobbyists and banks of computers to run the simulations. Vavrysh also contacted Oleksandr Polishchuk, the Deputy Minister of Defense, who brought the idea to the Air Force, which agreed to help identify pilots for the program.

A country would typically not start training pilots until making the formal decision to request the planes. “We don’t yet have the political decision, but there are some political signals that we might get these weapons at some point. For us that means: start training to use them,” Polishchuk says.

When U.S. Secretary of the Air Force Frank Kendall was asked in late July if the U.S. would consider giving Ukraine A-10s, he didn’t rule it out in the long term. “Older U.S. systems are a possibility,” Kendall said, speaking at the Aspen Security Forum. “As Ukraine, which is pretty busy dealing with the right-now problem, tries to sort out what its future will be longer term, we will be open to discussions with them about what their requirements are and how we might be able to satisfy them.”