The F-16 is vulnerable without other planes protecting and coordinating.
What would be interesting is if:
1. If the pilots and maintenance crew are NATO pilots and maintenance crew (including ‘recently retired pilots’, which was an option offered by the former head of the company formerly known as Blackwater).
2. Whether the F-16s are based in NATO territory, as in, they take off and land from airports outside Ukraine. This would be an interesting one since basing the F-16s outside Ukraine would make them more survivable, but raise some questions on whether that is a - cough cough - escalation.
3. The most interesting one though is if the F-16s are allowed to keep their LINK-16 system, enabling secure and tactically-helpful data links with other NATO assets. If so, this could mean that NATO AWACS operating, say just inside the Polish border, could provide situational awareness of ‘Ukrainian’ F-16s. Maybe even provide better targeting for AMRAAMs.
Any of the three would be quite helpful to Ukraine. Of the three, only 2 would be easily ‘provable’ while 1 and 3 would be difficult to prove by the Russians (unless a live pilot or a mostly intact plane was captured). And even then it would be he said/she said …like the case of German crews being caught in a destroyed Leopard II.
Anyway, interesting days. Let’s see what happens.
The biggest fear though I think Sankara escalation. Eg, Russia performing a false flag attack where alleged Ukrainian soldiers massacre a Russian village. Similar to how ‘Chechen or Dagestani’ terrorists bombed a building and sparked the Second Chechen war.