A brand new F-35 training site under construction in northwest Arkansas is preparing to welcome fighter pilots from around the globe this fall.
Ebbing Air National Guard Base will turn into the most recent U.S.-based site dedicated to training foreign pilots across the worldwide F-35 Joint Strike Fighter enterprise, which now encompasses greater than 3,500 jets in 18 countries.
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The brand new hub will allow more instructor pilots from the U.S. — the most important member of the F-35 coalition at greater than 2,400 jets — to share their expertise with a rotating forged of countries who’ve less operational experience with one in all the world’s most advanced fighters or lack the resources to host a multinational school of their very own.
Learning from the U.S. could make the international coalition sharper in combat, Col. David Skalicky, who oversees the project as commander of the thirty third Fighter Wing at Florida’s Eglin Air Force Base, told Air Force Times. Military officials argue that familiarity can prove crucial if the countries must go to war together.
“This is admittedly about increasing the aptitude and capability of our allies and partners,” he said.
Poland is slated to reach as the primary foreign F-35 user on campus in September, followed by Finland, Germany, Switzerland and Singapore within the years ahead.
They’ll learn from the brand new eighty fifth Fighter Group and 57th Fighter Squadron, expected to open at Ebbing July 2, an Air Force spokesperson said.
F-35 pilots from Italy, Norway, Denmark and the Netherlands already train at Arizona’s Luke Air Force Base; Belgium is slated to start lessons there as well. But Luke lacks the resources and room to welcome students from greater than a dozen other countries, spurring the international coalition to look for one more site where foreign pilots can learn from the Americans.
The U.S. Air Force tapped Ebbing to host the foreign training mission in March 2023 after a fierce, yearslong lobbying effort by Michigan’s congressional delegation to bring the jets to Selfridge ANGB north of Detroit.
Typically, foreign militaries learn from U.S. pilots at bases which can be already operating the identical aircraft. Not so for Ebbing, at which F-35 training will turn into the one on-site flying mission.
The bottom will construct recent F-35 pilots from scratch, with students who’ve already qualified to fly fighters but are getting their first taste of the fifth-generation plane itself, Skalicky said.
As many as 36 jets will arrive on base, including 24 F-35s. Ebbing may also host as much as 12 F-16s as a part of a Singaporean training unit that’s transferring from Luke, said Col. Adam Rice, an Air Education and Training Command official tasked with coordinating the project’s progress.
The Air Force expects about 4 pilots will graduate from Ebbing in 2025 before growing to about three dozen graduates every year through the tip of the last decade, Rice said.
Trainees will start their seven-month Joint Strike Fighter journey at Eglin — the Air Force’s closest lively duty F-35 site — where they’ll be exposed to the F-35′s controls and tactics in classroom lessons and simulated sorties. This system shall be split between Eglin and Ebbing until the brand new location finishes constructing a simulator facility of its own.
In Florida, they’ll jump from virtual takeoffs and landings to one-on-one aerial dogfights and multi-jet offensives, Skalicky said.
“We often progress from that time into surface attack [and] suppression of enemy air defense, in addition to some higher mission sets like offensive counter-air, escorting strikers … or being a part of a strike package,” he said.
After about three months, students will trek greater than 700 miles to Ebbing for the second half of the course, once they’ll take to the skies to practice what they’ve learned.
Rice said the project is working to expand the present training airspace at Ebbing. The positioning may herald low-cost threat emitters, or hardware that replicates surface-to-air missile systems so pilots can learn to evade enemy air defenses.
Air Education and Training Command boss Lt. Gen. Brian Robinson “has promised ‘first-class’ training, not ‘world-class’ training, at Ebbing,” Rice said. “It won’t be a training space like Nellis, as an illustration, but it should be good-quality training for the [foreign military sales] customers.”
Some who graduate will head back to their home countries, where they’ll join their first F-35 units. Others will return to Eglin for further training to turn into instructor pilots with a view to construct their very own domestic training pipelines, Skalicky said.
To remodel the Air National Guard base of about 1,000 troops and civilian employees and an MQ-9 drone wing right into a top-tier training range for high-tech fighters, the Air Force is embarking on a $850 million project that is anticipated to complete by the tip of 2028.
Since the clock is ticking for troops to reach at Ebbing, the Air Force plans to first host classes in an array of trailers and tension-fabric shelters on base. Those temporary facilities will tide over the training enterprise for a number of years because the service renovates existing spaces like maintenance shops, while constructing Joint Strike Fighter-specific facilities for simulators and storage.
Singapore, whose forces shall be permanently stationed at Ebbing, is bringing the F-35B, the vertical takeoff-and-landing version of the jet also flown by the U.S. Marine Corps. Since the Air Force’s variant doesn’t have the identical capability, the service has to seek out other instructor pilots to assist the Singaporeans, and make sure the flightline is reinforced with special concrete that may withstand the jet’s forces, Rice said.
In September, airmen from Eglin will hold a training exercise at Ebbing to wring out any issues at the location before foreign countries begin arriving later that month, Skalicky said.
But there’s still loads of work ahead for the complicated project, which requires Air Force officials to weave the wants and desires of multiple countries right into a cohesive training ground while navigating erratic congressional funding and a volatile construction market.
“Post-COVID, we’ve had challenges with supply and demand, construction, laborers, you name it. We’re still experiencing that across the enterprise,” said Col. George Nichols, deputy director of facility engineering on the Air Force Civil Engineer Center.
“[I’ve] been doing this for 23 years, and that is one of the crucial complex beddowns that we’ve done,” he said.
Rachel Cohen is the editor of Air Force Times. She joined the publication as its senior reporter in March 2021. Her work has appeared within the Washington Post, the Frederick News-Post (Md.), Air and Space Forces Magazine, Inside Defense, Inside Health Policy and elsewhere.