The Polish military has only about 40 F-16 pilots. It should have almost twice as many. They won’t be found quickly, because training one takes about two years, Monday’s Rzeczpospolita reports.
The Air Force operates 47 F-16 aircraft, so it should have at least 70 trained pilots. Yet Rzeczpospolita has learned that there are only about 40. Even taking into account that only about half of the “Hawks,” as the jets are known in Poland, can currently be put in the air, that number is too small to use the air fleet effectively. The problem cannot be solved quickly, because training an F-16 pilot takes about two years. The staffing shortfall stems in part from an inefficient training system: last year in Dęblin, only a few jet pilots were trained.
On top of that, some F-16 pilots have moved over to F-35 aircraft. Four years ago, the then-inspector of the air force, Gen. Ireneusz Nowak, who is now the operational commander of the Polish Armed Forces, said publicly that there would be trouble staffing the American fighters, the newspaper recalls.
Today the problem is even more pressing and, despite the passage of years, still far from solved. In 2025, Poland signed a contract worth nearly PLN 15 billion to modernize its aircraft to the F-16 V Viper standard, known as MLU. Yet it is unable to spend an additional several hundred million zlotys to have an adequate number of trained pilots. A similar problem may arise with AH-64E Apache helicopters. The army wants as many as 400 pilots for them, Rzeczpospolita reports. (PAP)
