Red Hawk joins long history of jet trainers

On Nov. 8, 2023, the Air Force Test Center at Edwards Air Force Base received its first Boeing T-7A Red Hawk jet trainer for developmental flight testing.

Boeing lists the T-7A’s top speed as a high subsonic .975 mach, provided by a single afterburning F404 engine.

Air Force officials figure the Red Hawk is still a couple years away from being the 21st Century jet trainer expected to replace the 1960s Northrop T-38 Talon.

The Air Force has a long history with a few two-seat jet trainers that have helped produce thousands of silver-winged aviators.

When the Lockheed P-80 (later F-80) Shooting Star single-seat jet fighter of 1944 proved its worth, the company drew up a two-seat training version, a little over three feet longer. The prototype was created by stretching an existing F-80, and the original nomenclature for the jet trainer was TF-80 Shooting Star.

Lockheed built 128 of the trainers as TF-80Cs before the designation was changed to T-33.

So successful was the T-33 as an advanced trainer that its production run far outstripped that of the original single-seat F-80. Well over 6,000 T-33s, including some foreign examples built under license, eclipsed the tally for single-seat P-80 fighters, placed at just over 1,700.

The T-33A could attain a top speed of at least 543 miles per hour and cruise at around 450.

In addition to long service in the pilot training role, T-33s flew as utility transportation and simulated adversary aircraft for interception. T-33s served the Air Force from 1948 through 1967 in the advanced training role, and for at least two decades longer as a pilot proficiency, aerial radar adversary, and miscellaneous utility jet.

The Air Force codified its need for a jet primary trainer with the purchase of Cessna’s twin-jet T-37 in 1953.

T-37s and T-33s shared the skies for many years. The slow T-37, with its high-pitched whine, was waggishly called a machine for turning jet fuel into noise, and some compared it to a 6,000-pound dog whistle. The T-37B cruised at a modest 360 mph and could post a top speed of 425.

Nonetheless, the T-37 proved to be a well-liked trainer, capable of including spin recovery in the flight syllabus. The T-37’s side-by-side seating afforded greater interaction between instructor and student than traditional tandem trainers.

The T-37, an original design, lent itself to an attack variant, the A-37 Dragonfly that saw service over Vietnam in a reverse play on the fighter-converted-into-trainer scenario.

As a primary jet trainer for the Air Force, T-37s served from early 1957 to 2009.

The Air Force’s next foray into a dedicated two-seat trainer jet was the rakish Northrop T-38 Talon, a sibling of the company’s N-156F (later F-5) Freedom Fighter.

Supersonic, the T-38 first flew on April 10, 1959. Originally said to have a top speed of 820 mph, provided by a pair of J85 jet engines, T-38s brought a curvy area-rule glamour to the world of training aircraft. They have held sway in Air Force jet training for more than 60 years.

To be sure, many other aircraft types have fulfilled training roles in the U.S. Air Force, ranging from converted fighters like the TF-102, to bizjet stand-ins like T-1A Jayhawk transports to small turboprops and piston-engine adaptations.

But the family tree of long-term dedicated two-seat jet trainers in the Air Force has been a story of success evidenced by the decades of training service the T-33, T-37, and T-38 provided.

Now the T-7A Red Hawk is poised at the flight test threshold to take its place in this jet training succession.

If some pundits have already posited an attack variant spinning off from the T-7A trainer, Boeing has been succinct in stating the company’s focus now is to deliver a trainer without distractions before pondering any other missions for the Red Hawk airframe.

Astronaut and Warbird Pilot Frank Borman 1928-2023

Frank Borman was an Apollo and Gemini astronaut, a retired Air Force colonel, one-time CEO of Eastern Airlines, and the former owner/pilot of a meticulously restored Bell P-63A Kingcobra. Borman died in Billings, Montana, at the age of 95 on Nov. 7, 2023.

In 1998, Borman flew his P-63 at EAA AirVenture Oshkosh, where the Kingcobra earned World War II Grand Champion status.

I had the opportunity to photograph him with his P-63 and talk about the aircraft.

My recollection of Frank Borman is that he came to fly his warbird and have a good time chatting with people in that easygoing way that permeates the whole Oshkosh experience.

Rest in peace, Frank Borman.