Poland has begun training its air force pilots to operate Lockheed Martin F-35 stealth fighters.
The Polish ministry of defence confirmed to FlightGlobal on 3 February that aviators from the Polish air force (PAF) have begun F-35 flight training at Ebbing Air National Guard Base in Arkansas. The programme of instruction began in the final week of January, with the first F-35 sortie by a PAF officer taking place on 31 January.
Poland’s initial two F-35A examples left Lockheed’s Fort Worth factory in late December. The jets were ferried to Ebbing, where they were turned over to Warsaw.
The base will host partner training for certain F-35 Foreign Military Sales (FMS) customers in the coming years, including Poland, Finland, Singapore, Germany and Switzerland.
The US Air Force (USAF) selected Ebbing to host F-35 FMS pilot training in 2023, with the base supplementing an existing F-35 FMS training detachment at Hill AFB in Utah.
Environmental regulations capped the number of F-35s approved to operate from Hill at 24 aircraft, according to the USAF. The addition of Ebbing will allow the FMS training programme to expand capacity by 50%, with plans to station 12 F-35s at the site.
Warsaw eventually plans to field 32 conventional take-off and landing F-35As, which will operate locally with the moniker “Husarz”. The first aircraft is expected to arrive in Poland in 2026, with the PAF fleet anticipated to reach full operational capability by 2030. Lockheed displayed the first jet (designated tail number AZ-01) last August.
The Polish fleet will be split between bases in the cities of Lask and Swidwin. Lask currently hosts a squadron operating Lockheed F-16C/Ds, while Swidwin is home to a unit flying Soviet-origin Sukhoi Su-22 ground-attack jets.
While the initial crop of Polish aviators are now flying F-35s in the USA, other PAF personnel are beginning to work with the jets at home. A contingent of F-35As from Norway are temporarily stationed at the Krzesiny military air base as part of NATO’s air-policing mission along the alliance’s eastern frontier.
”The key issue will be the integration of the F-35 and F-16,” PAF Lieutenant Colonel Michal Zloch told Polish military magazine Polska Zbrojna in January. “The preparation of pilots of both types of machines so that they can cooperate with each other as effectively as possible, and training with the Norwegians is helpful in this.”
The two Royal Norwegian Air Force fighters arrived in Poland in December and were scrambled in January in response to what NATO Air Command described as a “massive number of Russian aircraft” approaching Polish airspace.
The Russian aircraft ultimately changed course before breaching NATO territory.
