List of aviation shootdowns and accidents during the Syrian Civil War

According to Strategy Page, by mid 2013, nearly a hundred fixed wing and over a hundred helicopters were lost. Some 400 aircrew was killed, captured, or missing. In September 2014, the Syrian Revolution General Commission (SRGC) claimed that since the conflict began the Syrian military lost 37 helicopters and 24 jets. Of these, 40 aircraft were shot down and the other 21 were destroyed in opposition attacks on military airports. Public observation via Google Earth of Syrian airfields shows a decreasing number of air-frames parked in the open in contrast to the increasing number of recorded air sorties. The hubs of Syrian Air Force basing activity during the Syrian Civil War have been the airfields at Aleppo, Damascus, Latakia and Hama, however it is not possible to independently verify these information.

However most of the virtual losses can actually be attributed to paper write offs: usually when an armed confrontation starts, the paper numbers about the National Armed Forces circulating before the War did account for several vehicles which were actually abandoned or not serviced or in a generic poor maintenance status. In the Syrian example, MiG-23MS, older MiG-21 versions, Su-20 (which is an older variant of the active Su-22), nearly all the MiG-25 and several other air-frames were already in disrepair before the war started.

Also the motivated personnel who will join the fight when the Nation slides into a war is usually much smaller than the initial paper number. This is even more relevant when talking about armed forces based on conscription engaged in a civil war. This explains the sharp drop in vehicles and soldiers, way beyond the actual number of combat losses in most occasions. The same could be observed for the Iraqi Armed forced during the 2003 invasion of Iraq, the Libyan Armed Forces during the Libyan Civil War (2011) and the Ukrainian Armed Forces during the War in Donbass.

Thanks to external support by Iran and Russia, the combat readiness of the Syrian Arab Air Force actually increased over the years of the Civil War, with the resources being rationalized towards useful assets and wider availability of service and parts for the remaining air-frames.

As usual during an armed confrontation, it is impossible to determine the cause of each single crash, since nearly always the opposing party claims the aircraft was shot down by their forces while the side flying the aircraft blames it to accidental causes. On instances, even the presence of a video does not clarify what happened since a flash may be due to an antiaircraft shell or an engine explosion.

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Wikipedia