07 Mar 25. British Army troops from 4 SCOTS conducted trench clearing live fire and night training at Smârdan Camp in Romania during Exercise STDT25. During Exercise STDT25 (STEADFAST DART 2025) in Romania in February troops from 4 SCOTS (4th Battalion, Royal Regiment of Scotland) conducted trench clearing live fire and night training at Smârdan Camp, Romania. UK service personnel from the 6th Regiment Royal Logistics Corps and the 2 Rifles – Light Infantry Battalion, arrived at, and moved from, the port of Alexandroúpoli in Greece to training areas throughout Romania, during the Strategic Deployment portion of NATO Exercise STEADFAST DART 2025. Alexandroúpoli Air and Sea Ports of Departure (A/SPOD) served as a strategic location to demonstrate deployment capabilities and interoperability between participating nations. Concurrently, a second UK contingent shipped to Emden in Germany travelled overland to Romania. Exercise STEADFAST DART 2025 was intended to test and train the operational deployment of the Allied Reaction Force (ARF) to NATO Vigilance Area South-East, focusing on the planning and execution of a pre-crisis multi-domain activity that aims to reinforce the Allied forces located in Romania and Bulgaria. Throughout January and February 2025, personnel and equipment from Bulgaria, France, Greece, Italy, Spain, Slovenia, Türkiye and the United Kingdom have manoeuvred to NATO’s eastern flank via road, sea and air. This included over 17 naval assets, 20 aircraft, 1,500 military vehicles and 10,000 personnel – making it the largest NATO exercise of 2025. (Source: joint-forces.com)
07 Mar 25. Vietnam completes acquisition of L-39 Skyfox trainers. The Czech manufacturer, Aero Vodochody, has said that it has completed delivery of Vietnam’s order of 12 L-39 Skyfox trainer and light attack aircraft. In a statement on 6 March, Aero Vodochody said that alongside its co-owner, Omnipol, it completed the delivery of the final batch of six new-generation L-39s to the Vietnam People’s Air Force (VPAF). The company, however, did not specify when the delivery was completed. Vietnam ordered 12 aircraft in 2021, with the first batch of L-39 Skyfoxes delivered to the VPAF in 2023. The VPAF had a total of six Skyfoxes in service by August 2024. According to Aero Vodochody, the VPAF’s “long-standing experience” with older L-39C Albatros trainers that were inducted from 1980 is assisting the air force’s transition to the L-39 Skyfox. VFAP pilots are being “helped to do so by, for example, ground-based pilot training facilities, a computer-assisted learning system, the cabin procedures simulator, and the full mission simulator”, the company said in a statement in February 2025.
“The retraining of Vietnamese pilots on the L-39 Skyfox, including instructor training, began with training the first group of pilots for approximately 250 flight hours and 350 sorties,” the company added.
The L-39 Skyfox is equipped with a full-glass cockpit with two large displays, a transparent display, and the hands-on throttle and stick (HOTAS) system. According to Aero Vodochody, its Virtual Training System (VTS) also gives the VPAF the ability to simulate “complex combat scenarios without the need for an additional aircraft in the air”. (Source: Janes)