Top Gun UK: meet the elite fighter pilots preparing for combat

They’re not Gen Five but they’re fast, agile and Russia has about 100 of them,” says Justin Bronk, an expert in air power at the Royal United Services Institute. So how do Russia’s pilots stack up against ours? “Generally worse across the board,” Bronk says. “One of the advantages that the RAF and particularly the US air force have always had is that they fly a lot. It takes hours in the air to maintain an edge. RAF frontline pilots get fewer hours than they used to but it’s still 20 to 50 per cent more than the average Russian pilot.”