Poland has about 40 F-16 pilots for 47 jets, short of at least 70 needed

Forty pilots for 47 jets

Poland's F-16 fleet stands at 47 fighters after the 2025 crash that destroyed one aircraft. Rzeczpospolita, citing two independent sources, says the air force has only about 40 pilots for the type. Using a benchmark of at least 1.5 pilots per aircraft, the force would need a minimum of about 70 trained airmen. Only about half of the jets can currently be scrambled, and the paper argues that even this reduced fleet needs more pilots to be used effectively.

Pilots available (approx.)40

Minimum needed (1.5 per aircraft)70

Pilots available (approx.)

40 pilots

Minimum needed (1.5 per aircraft)

70 pilots

Data from the article text

The Ministry of National Defence has not made the figures public. Its March 2026 answer to a parliamentary question treated the numbers as classified.

“The data on the number of trained pilots and instructor pilots are classified information and cannot be made public.”

Training takes years and the pipeline is narrow

Training a F-16 pilot takes about two years, according to the paper. Candidates first train in Poland on the M-346 Master, or on the T-38 if they train in the United States, before completing the B-course (basic course). Flying combat duty requires a further stage, and the highest qualification is instructor. One insider described the training system at Dęblin as underperforming, and another pointed to more young candidates quitting before they finish. An experienced pilot said medical requirements for Polish candidates are too demanding. Limited places on foreign courses add to the bottleneck, and the paper notes that more money alone may not be enough.

Upgrades and F-35s compete for the same people

Some F-16 pilots have moved over to the F-35, which Poland is receiving at a rate of a dozen or so this year. General Ireneusz Nowak, then the air force inspector, warned publicly around 2022 that staffing the American fighters would be difficult. He now serves as operational commander of the Polish Armed Forces. In 2025 Poland signed a contract worth almost 15 billion zloty to upgrade its F-16s to the Viper standard (MLU), yet the army cannot spend several hundred extra million zloty to train the pilots it needs. The same problem may affect AH-64E Apache helicopters, for which the army wants up to 400 pilots.

Official response

Rzeczpospolita put the question to the General Command officially, but had received no information by the time of publication. The paper's figures therefore rest on the two anonymous sources it cites. An editorial in the same paper argues that buying equipment is easy, while decades of neglect cannot be made up in a few years. Pilots and technicians, it says, are the harder part of modernisation.