Desert vTraining

摘要

Koninklijke Luchtmacht (KLU) F-16s and personnel deployed to the United States for seven weeks of extensive training in the first quarter of 2017. Two so-called visiting units spent two weeks each at Davis-Monthan during the initial four weeks for a training programme called CONUS 2017, while a third detachment participated in exercise Red Flag 17-2 at Nellis Air Force Base in Nevada. Each visiting unit at Davis-Monthan comprised a mixed party of some 130 people from Volkel and Leeuwarden Air Bases: pilots, technicians and support personnel. The detachment at Nellis totalled 140 KLU personnel, plus another 60 from the Arizona Air National Guard (ANG) that normally supports the KLU F-16 training operations of the Netherlands Detachment Tucson Arizona at Tucson Air National Guard Base located at Tucson International Airport. During the whole period in the United States, a logistic detachment of 20-25 Dutch military supported the roughly 400 KLU personnel rotating in and out during the deployment. Fram May 2017, the skies over northern Holland have been alive with the noise of fast jets because Koninklijke Luchtmacht F-16s were flying in a new Fighter Weapons Instructor Training (FWIT) course. Student pilots from the European Participating Air Forces (EPAF) F-16 community of Belgium, Denmark, Norway, the Netherlands and Portugal are learning to become weapons officers.