First loss of F-16 in Ukraine in an aerial Combat
Initial reports indicate that the jet wasn’t shot down, but likely crashed due to pilot error, the official said
Previously a third generation Indian made MiG 21 Bison of the Indian Air Force had shot down a fourth generation F 16 fighter jet of the Pakistan Air Force in an aerial combat in 2019. USA had tried its level best to deny this “shooting down”, though they were more bewildered by the failure of all the AIM 120 BVRAAM missiles fired by the PAF.
Now once again the much touted F16 flown by the Ukrainian Air Force has been shot down by the Russians. Initial reports tried to show that the jet wasn’t shot down, but likely crashed due to pilot error. The incident had occurred during a massive Russian missile attack. This happened just weeks after the first of the US-made aircraft arrived in Ukraine, according to the report.
A US official has confirmed that Ukraine lost the first of its F-16 fighter jets, the Wall Street Journal reported. Though the Ukrainian Air Force wouldn’t confirm the loss or the status of the pilot.
Russian Foreign Ministry Spokeswoman Maria Zakharova had said quite sometime back that F-16 fighters would not become a magic pill that could influence the course of hostilities and “will be consistently destroyed by the Russian armed forces.”
The F-16 fighter jets handed over to the Kiev government are quite vulnerable to Russia’s anti-aircraft missiles, as Ukrainian pilots lack experience to fly them safely, The Wall Street Journal newspaper reported.
According to the report, the Kiev government hoped that the advanced Western aircraft would give its forces an edge on the battlefield. However, many of the aircraft it had received were “secondhand,” had “decades of flying time already,” and were also “vulnerable to Russian air defence missiles.”
Besides, the training course for Ukrainian pilots was “accelerated” and their training curriculum – “not standard.” “There’s still, very frankly, risk there,” an unnamed US official told WSJ.
Red faced American officials are still saying that the jet was not shot down, and the crash was likely due to pilot error. The Ukrainian Air Force confirmed the death of a Ukrainian F-16 pilot, Alexey Mes. The pilot was trained to fly F-16, according to CNN. The General Staff of the Ukrainian Armed Forces said the pilot was killed in an aerial fight, when his plane crashed on August 26.
An Ukrainian lawmaker Maryana Bezuglaya on the other hand is claiming that the aircraft had been mistakenly downed by a Patriot missile in a friendly fire incident.
Error according to my information, the F-16 of the Ukrainian pilot Alexey ‘Moonfish’ Mes was shot down by the Patriot anti-aircraft missile system due to a lack of coordination between the [military] units,” she wrote on Telegram.
The lawmaker criticized the Air Force of the Ukrainian Armed Forces for falsely describing the incident as “a crash.”
“The culture of lies in the Air Force Command of the Armed Forces of Ukraine, as well as in other higher military headquarters, leads to the fact that the system of managing military decisions does not improve on the basis of truthful, consistently collected analytics, but deteriorates and even collapses, as is happening in the other directions,” she wrote.
In her words, none of the generals was punished over the incident that led to the loss of both the aircraft and its pilot.
