Ukraine said the F-16 crashed in the fight against the Russian attack, the pilot survived

Ukraine said one of its F-16 fighter planes crashed by pushing a Russian air attack, but its pilot survived.

On Friday, in an ad, the Ukraine Air Force said that the preliminary data showed that the pilot had destroyed three air targets and targeted a fourth when a problem occurred with the American manufacturing jet.

“An emergency situation has occurred on board,” he said, a translation of the Ukrainian publication Militoryi.

The Air Force did not explain what was the situation or if the Russian targets were drones, missiles or planes.

But he said that the pilot was safely ejected after having moved away from a populated area, and was quickly found and evacuated by a rescue team.

He described the pilot as safe and stable.

The Air Force said that the incident occurred around 3:30 am on Friday and that a special commission was investigating what happened.

Ukraine lost at least two F-16 before this incident, one of which crashed last year while fighting Russian missiles.

Ukraine’s F-16s, a fighter plane originally produced by General Dynamics and now manufactured by Lockheed Martin, were used to defend cities and stop the Russian attacks.

But although this role was important, many experts in the air war describe it as the one to which Ukraine has been pushed because it does not have enough jets to use in other roles.

Ukraine began to ask for the F-16 shortly after the launch of its large-scale invasion in February 2022, but the former only arrived in the summer of 2024.

Some allied countries wanted to send them earlier, but had permission to provide the Jets made in the United States, which the United States was initially reluctant to give.

The Biden administration feared that their arrival will lead to a Russian escalation and that it would take too long to train Ukrainian pilots to use and integrate them into its soldiers. However, the United States has finally enabled other countries to send the jets.

Ukraine was engaged around 85 F-16 in the Netherlands, Belgium, Norway and Denmark, although they have not all arrived.

None of Ukraine’s F-16s came from the United States, although it sends spare parts.

Air-war experts said that not F-16 have been given to Ukraine to be able to use them offensively

Ukraine F-16s are older models which were previously used by other air forces and are more limited in their capacities.

Despite this, Ukraine behaves well with the jets.

Ret. Colonel John Venable, a 25-year-old veteran from the US Air Force and a former F-16 driver, told BI in January that Ukraine Air Force had made huge jumps and that his pilots had demonstrated impressive skills.

Troels Lund Poulsen, Minister of Denmark, told BI in February that Ukraine had dispelled the doubts that he could not manage the jets.

“Ukrainian pilots and the Ukrainian armed forces and the Air Force have also shown that they are able to face this new capacity,” he said.

Among other achievements, it is said that a Ukrainian pilot released six cruise missiles in a single flight, a feat that no pilot had previously achieved with the jet.

The survival of the pilot of this last crash is probably good news for Ukraine. Pilots are often considered just as important, if not more, as the jets themselves, because they take a long time to train and are difficult to replace.

Many air-war experts say that certain F-16 losses are to be expected and that it is not intrinsically a bad sign that Ukraine has lost some of the jets.

Michael Bohnert, an expert at Air Corporation Air War, previously told Bi that Ukraine should be able to take risks with the jets, and that “if one of the F-16s arrives at the end of the war, they were probably not used hard enough”.

The remaining F-16s promised by the allies of Ukraine should still arrive, and Poulsen, the Minister of Denmark, told Bi that he hoped that more countries would undertake to send additional jets: “More F-16 are necessary in Ukraine.”