@petit_bateau so what platforms are the Ukraine pilots going to be trained on?
What longer range weapons?
At this point it is all clear as mud.
The Hawks for the early-ish stages of flight training are already a major problem, so much so that UK is looking at sending our own trainees to Australia and USA. Very embarassing and a problem with decades of bad decision making leading into it.
My suspicion - and I have zero private information, which of course is why I can speculate
- is that the most relevant training is the more advanced weapons/etc courses. A heck of a lot of that stuff happens on simulators, and we do have a lot of good simulators and the wider training environment (i.e. instructors, syllabus, etc). So I suspect that is the more likely training packages. Those packages would be of value irrespective of aircraft type as a lot of this stuff can read across into F16, Gripen, etc.
Regarding hardware again I don't know. We have 20-30 Typhoon tranche 1 that are in storage. (We'd been using these 20-30 tranche 1 for QRA purposes, so mostly pure air-to-air; most of the air-to-ground weaponry was included in tranche 3 from memory) Theoretically they could be gifted to Ukraine, however they are supposedly un-upgradeable to tranche 2, 3, etc. At least that is the excuse the MoD/Treasury have been trotting out for years for not upgrading them. Unfortunately BAe spoilt that excuse last week by saying "of course we can refurbish them and upgrade them" and the reality is that money has been the bigger consideration. Which I perfectly well accept, but at least be honest and say so. The rumour is that these airframes have been robbed of all the good stuff to keep other Typhoons serviceable, but how much truth there is in that rumour I don't know. A good solution would be to refurbish them and gift them to Ukraine in tranche 1 or 1+ state, and that way we can keep the best stuff away from Russian hands, and simultaneously put the airframes to some use. However we should note that the Typhoon tranche 1 is still a very potent twin engine aircraft with a range that would allow it to penetrate a long way into Russia (or elsewhere) if it were based in Ukraine, i.e. the West should think carefully about the longer term implications if this stuff ends up in the wrong hands.
Regarding weaponry (which is to an extent airframe independent, as much of thiscan be carried on both F16 and Gripen etc) clearly Ukraine needs to switch across to Western aviation missile families for sustainment reasons - Sidewinder is the easy give. But Ukraine needs longer range stuff to deal with the corresponding Russian usage, and that means as a minimum AMRAAM or Iris, but ideally Meteor. I cannot see Meteor being offered to Ukraine, it is likely too valuable. But some AMRAAM or Iris might be do-able. For air-to-ground I think that only the shorter range stuff would be on offer - GPS, LGB, and HARM/ALAARM which are of course within the existing usage.
But like I say details are very sparse.
en.wikipedia.org
/cloudfront-us-east-2.images.arcpublishing.com/reuters/VIFHTGXIZNOYPANECXJH6GXFPQ.jpg)
www.reuters.com
www.businessinsider.de
www.theguardian.com
