Just how many Ukrainians are pilots flying drones in combat against Russia?
Figures are imprecise but they are impressive. According to official Armed Forces of Ukraine (AFU) statements, total service personnel participating in drone operations one way or another is about 80,000 men and women. The number of trained pilots is not made public.
The best-documented (and most effective) subset of those troops, Ukraine’s elite Unmanned Systems Forces [Сили безпілотних систем (literally, Force of Pilotless Systems) Збройних Сил України (Armed Forces of Ukraine), or SBS of the AFU], currently number about 15,000 personnel. Pilot counts are classified but, current SBS recruiting offers roughly one pilot slot to every two non-flying job slots.
But besides pilots flying for the SBS, the AFU fields dedicated drone units in more than one hundred maneuver brigades and close to five hundred maneuver battalions and regiments.
In interviews, Ukrainian pilots and drone unit commanders told Kyiv Post that that the number of first-line Ukrainian drone pilots, counting all service branches, flying robot aircraft in combat against Russia certainly number in the tens of thousands. Estimates by those operators ranged from 25,000-40,000 active drone operators/pilots.
By comparison, the entire Italian Air Force – pilots, weather forecasters, mechanics, cooks, carabinieri, and generals and adjutants inclusive – numbers about 35,000-43,000 service personnel and around 1,500 pilots.
The number of US Air Force service members stationed in Europe, likewise, is usually reported to be 30,000-35,000 airmen of whom 2,000-3,000 are pilots. The entire armed forces of Norway – land, sea and air – number about 25,000 service members. Netherlands’ total force is 44,000.
A ballpark figure of ALL the pilots in NATO, not counting North America, is about 15,000 aviators.
So how does Ukraine train drone pilots?
It’s a big operation and it grew up organically, and it still isn’t centrally run. When Russia first invaded Ukraine in 2014, Ukrainian drone pilots trained themselves, and for the most part recruiting and flight instruction during the 2015-2021 “ceasefire” period, in operations against Russian and separatist forces in Donbas, a Ukrainian drone pilot was a semi-hobbyist acquiring unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) with his own or donors’ money, and working out tactics and flight skills on his own or with other drone enthusiasts.
Russia’s second invasion of Ukraine in February 2022 forced outgunned Ukrainian combat units and commanders to massive drone use for reconnaissance. Dire shortages of artillery shells – disastrously worsened by a US decision to halt all military support to Ukraine in October 2023 – drove a revolution in Ukrainian strike drone technology.
The first drone schools and academies, almost always starting out as an informal group of instructor pilots, were founded in early 2024. As Ukraine’s drone forces have expanded, so has the sophistication and scale of Ukraine’s national drone pilot training effort.
In Spring 2026, some AFU soldiers still were becoming drone pilots by the traditional route of gravitating to the unit’s drone section and learning by doing, but that was the exception. The dominant majority of new Ukrainian drone pilots go to a proper flight school first.
Civilians may sign AFU contracts guaranteeing service as a drone operator, and men and women already in uniform, if wishing to become a drone pilot, must pass certified flight training before re-assignment.
Operators, instructors and former flight school students interviewed by Kyiv Post in mid-May described a nation-wide network of flight academies that, those accounts said, reliably convert a person without experience on drones, into a basically competent pilot ready for more training at their combat unit, in about a month to two months.
Some of the flight schools are AFU-operated, some are unit-operated, others are for-profit businesses, or financed by private industry (usually a drone manufacturing company). The number and locations of the flight schools is classified because Russia prioritizes killing Ukrainian drone pilots. All instructors and school directors interviewed said flight training takes place year around at sites across Ukraine.
How did these flight schools come to be and what do they teach?
In the case of a successful, Zaporizhzhia-based businessman, large-scale drone pilot instruction in progress now started with financing material assistance to frontline units at the start of the war. As fighting progressed and demand for drones increased, funding was directed more and more into drone acquisition, and large numbers of drones delivered created a need for trainers.
After an 18-month stint commanding a drone strike unit, in response to a need for more pilots, in mid-2024 the volunteer group formed the for-pay private flight school called Center of Special Training (CST). The director said the school takes money to cover costs.
Now the center trains classes of pilot cadets made of a mix of new inductees, veteran soldiers wanting to become drone pilots, and already-operational drone pilots needing to transition to a new platform.
Most recently demand for transition training on interceptor drones is high, the CST director said. The business now has expanded into drone manufacturing, he said.
The Skyfall company, a major Ukrainian drone manufacturer, became a part of the Ukrainian drone pilot training ecosystem in effectively, the opposite way, by starting out as an aircraft builder and offering customers flight training as a service.
A company representative told Kyiv Post that since 2023 Skyfall flight schools had trained more than 20,000 operators, some brand-new and some transitioning to a new pilotless aircraft. Flight training is financed by the company and demand is high for training on the company’s P1Sun interceptor drone, that source said.
Some combat units run their own flight schools. In the case of the 4th Heavy Brigade, a frontline outfit recently deployed in the very hot Konstantynivka-Druzhivka sector, for a pilot to be assigned to combat fight operations they must first complete basic flight training at a government- or privately-run flight school like CST, and then fly as a junior pilot – a trainee assigned to a three-person drone section. It takes about three months of drone flying under veteran pilot supervision, before the average pilot becomes capable of performing most flight missions solo, the vice commander of that unit’s drone battalion said.
The AFU also runs its own flight schools. Two instructor pilots (IPs) from the 239th Center of Unit Training in interviews with Kyiv Post said their training group typically takes in a pilot cadet class of ten AFU service members, usually a mix of of inductees and experienced soldiers changing their military specialization to drone pilot.
The course is a conventional combination of classroom instruction and hands-on flight training, and is specific to a single drone type: qualification on a basic Chinese Mavic takes 39 days, a Vampir bomber drone 40-45 days, and First Person View (FPV drones) close to two months.
The drone instructor pilot (IP)-to-student pilot ratio usually is about one-to-ten. Funding is adequate and few student pilots wash out, but some are forwarded to their unit with the caveat that they probably need more practice, those sources said.
Is the quality of Ukrainian drone flight training any good?
More than 50 pilots, aircraft manufacturing company representatives, AFU drone unit commanders and drone technicians interviewed by Kyiv Post said that the training is helping to produce the most skilled combat UAV operators in the world. Practically all those interviewees, however, added the clarification that the one key to superior Ukrainian drone pilot skill is extensive experience operating drones in combat.
Many said that Ukrainian drone training is pragmatic and results-focused, and that near-continuous communications between the pilots doing the flying, and the companies or units carrying out the flight training, keeps what new drone operators learn current, making the entire training process efficient and producing fledgling pilots who are effective, though not yet combat aces.
Mykola Bulaenko, a developer at the Ukrainian software company BAZU, in a Tuesday interview described one piece of that process: a flight simulation program called FPV Battleground. Company staff, like most Ukrainians, had been in close contact with frontline soldiers for years, and donating to help from time to time.
In 2024, a Russian FPV computer game called FPV Kamikaze appeared on Steam that seemed mostly designed to allow a user to pretend he was blowing up Ukrainian military vehicles and soldiers, in an arcade-style environment.
Simultaneously, an AFU-sponsored drone simulator called Obriy came into use, but it focused on short, simple there-and-back missions in a neutral, non-dynamic environment in a sandbox simulating about two square kilometers of standard terrain.
Created by a six-developer team for about $50,000, FPV Battleground aims at replicating drone flight characteristics as accurately as possible, with realistic modeling of wind, drift, varying rotor torque and weather. Electronic warfare is replicated as well, including the typical loss of communications an FPV drone pilot faces in the terminal phase of an attack on a target protected by a jammer.
Users can create an up to 40x 40 km sandbox and model terrain, vegetation, and ground structures as desired. According to Bulaenko the flight model is at least “90-95 percent accurate, but it’s hard to be positive about the last 5-10 percent because pilots argue about what’s accurate.” Every new iteration of the simulator contains hundreds of tweaks to the flight model driven by feedback from combat operators testing the simulator against their real-world experience.
Both the militarized and civilian versions of the simulator are training tools in wide use in AFU units, and not just for training of pilots. In some ground force units, before sending troops to attack a location, an AFU brigade or corps staff will build a model of the objective and approaches to it in the BAZU simulator, and run iterations of strikes to determine the best way for drones to support the attack.
Russian ground units – vehicles and individuals – able to shoot back or dynamically seek cover are not yet modeled but developers are working on it. Future iterations will model Russian attack drones so that pilots can practice intercepting them.
Bulaenko said continuing development of the simulator is fully funded internally. Additionally, international interest in acquiring the militarized version of the simulator is high, he said.