Know Your F-16 care and feeding? Looking to travel to Eastern Europe for fun and profit?
Florida-based Draken International, a top-end commercial training and aggressor company that operates F-16s and Mirage F.1s among other types, is “Looking for former or current F16 technicians for employment in Europe.”
The job openings are for crew chiefs, avionics, and general maintenance techs with experience on F-16A/B aircraft, and a willingness to travel to Romania.
The country– which shares a 300-mile border with Ukraine– retired its last of some 400 MiG-21s earlier this year.
Romania now uses a squadron of 17 second-hand F-16AM/BM Block 15s (!) bought recently from Portugal, and signed a contract with Norway in November 2022 to another 32 additional 40-year-old F-16A/Bs for 388 million euros, to ensure the future transition to the new F-35 fighter jet. All of the RoAF F-16s are set to be upgraded to M6.5.2 operating configuration, with Kongsberg providing support– and apparently, Draken tapped in as a subcontractor.
It is not surprising that the work is being farmed out, as a lot of the extra bandwidth with F-16 techs in NATO is being contributed to the effort to get Ukraine’s pre-owned donated Vipers in the air sometime this year. Reportedly, 11 different countries are coming together on that project.
Besides the Ukraine F-16s, a lot of the guys with that skillset who are willing to travel have been in Iraq for the past couple of years off and on, with their late-model F-16IQ birds being kept in the air and regularly bombing ISIS targets largely via commercial Western support.