SG Talk

https://www.telegraph.co.uk/world-news/2...-invasion/


Night after night, Ukraine’s fighter jet pilots have taken the battle to an enemy that has “five times more planes”; their aircraft pushed to the limit with no time for pre-take-off checks. The chances of survival in the dogfights in Ukrainian airspace are all too slim.

But against the odds, Ukraine’s air force has kept flying a month since the Russian invasion started. Nobody gave the pilots more than a few days. Moscow’s failure to establish air superiority – key if it ever wanted to win a speedy victory – has caused the invasion to stall.

Without air cover, Vladimir Putin’s army is stuck, unable to venture beyond entrenched positions without being picked off at will.

For the first time, Ukrainian air force pilots have been allowed to tell their story of how they have kept the skies open after The New York Times was given access to pilots at an airbase, its location undisclosed for obvious reasons.

Andriy, 25, a Ukrainian fighter pilot, told the paper he was not informed of his mission until he was in the air. The pilots have little time for pre-flight briefings, seemingly aware that it is not a good idea to linger in one spot for too long.

Andriy, whose surname and rank has been kept secret, said there was no time in a conflict to make pre-take-off safety checks on his Sukhoi Su-27, a Soviet-origin, twin-engined fighter jet. Out of Ukraine’s total fleet of about 100 combat aircraft at the start of the war, roughly a third were Su-27s. Now, fewer than 60 are available.

“I don’t do any checks. I just take off,” he said, adding: “Every time when I fly, it’s for a real fight. In every fight with Russian jets, there is no equality. They always have five times more planes in the air.”

Ukraine got TS who uses saliva everyday to kill Russian soldiers and to destroy Russian jets lor! 

Oh no. Not another Ghost of Kiev scifi

The inflow of thousands of western Stinger antiaircraft missiles into Ukraine merely forced Russian forces to adapt

They simply switch to conducting their sorties at night as the Stingers do not have night vision capability