T-7A “Red Hawk” - new USAF Trainer Aircraft

[Isgrimnur]

Wired

[T]he US Air Force is launching a competition to find the jet that will educate its next generation of fighter pilots. Trainer jets are a bit like driver’s ed cars. Their two seats each offer a full set of controls, so the experienced Top Gun can mold noob pilots into air jocks without risking their lives. The Air Force’s current top trainer, the T-38 Talon, has been flying for 50 years; the youngest of the planes are in their mid-40s.

The T-X program has produced four competitors, all of them used to this sort of work. Lockheed Martin partnered with Korea Aerospace Industries to upgrade the existing T-50A trainer, which first flew in 2003. Northrop Grumman has a clean-sheet design, called Trainer-X, that made its maiden flight in August. Raytheon is positioning its T-100—an upgrade to its Italian partner Leonardo’s M-346 trainer—for the promotion. And Boeing, which teamed up with Saab Group for this effort, unveiled its all-new T-X last month.

Links added by me.

[GreenGoo]

I hear there's a 35 billion dollar solution looking for a problem to solve. Maybe this could be it.

[Isgrimnur]

[GreenGoo]

Never mind, apparently guessing just results in random numbers.

[Montag]

Let me just ruin the fun and say let us take the T-38 and build new ones with updated avionics and call it a day. I don't think climate change has affected the principles of flight just yet.

[Rip]

We should just skip straight to the T-800, I have it on good authority that it will kick ass!

[Default]

Let me just ruin the fun and say let us take the T-38 and build new ones with updated avionics and call it a day. I don't think climate change has affected the principles of flight just yet.

Same issue with updating the A-10 Warthog. The tooling has been scrapped for decades, so you would have to build a whole brand new assembly line just to build a fifty year old plane. It would be like building a 1966 Buick Electra from scratch, just because the roads are still asphalt.

[Kraken]

Doesn't Microsoft even make flight simulators anymore? Any aircraft that you can't control with a mouse and keyboard is impractical.

[Montag]

Let me just ruin the fun and say let us take the T-38 and build new ones with updated avionics and call it a day. I don't think climate change has affected the principles of flight just yet.

Same issue with updating the A-10 Warthog. The tooling has been scrapped for decades, so you would have to build a whole brand new assembly line just to build a fifty year old plane. It would be like building a 1966 Buick Electra from scratch, just because the roads are still asphalt.

It would still be more than an order of magnitude in higher cost to come up with a new design, tool, and test and qualify than to retool the existing air frame.

[Grifman]

Why is this in R & P?

[Isgrimnur]

Because it's going to get caught up in political maneuvering just like the tanker contract did.

[Isgrimnur]

Aviation Week

The U.S. Air Force’s once-crowded $16 billion T-X next-generation trainer competition is beginning to look more and more like a price shootout between the Lockheed Martin/Korea Aerospace Industries T-50A and Boeing/Saab BTX after Northrop Grumman expressed mixed feelings about entering the race.
What started out as six potential entrants including Raytheon/Leonardo, Sierra Nevada Corporation/Turkish Aerospace Industries and Textron Aviation prior to the Dec. 30 request for proposals has narrowed to five and perhaps fewer after the Raytheon/Leonardo team withdrew its M-346 Master-based T-100 offer.

The two firms left T-100 partners CAE USA and Honeywell Aerospace, as well as the town of Meridian, Mississippi, in the lurch on Jan. 25 when they abandoned T-X, having failed to come to a business agreement over the cost of the Italian aircraft, which Raytheon believed needed to be substantially lower to be competitive.

On Jan. 26, when asked if Northrop would bid, company CEO Wes Bush surprised some T-X watchers by saying no decision has been made either way, despite substantial investment in a flying prototype. “We don’t want to walk ourselves into a decision to do something just because we’ve been doing it,” he said.

Sierra Nevada has avoided saying whether its “Freedom Trainer” will enter the race, and Textron Aviation also will n0t say definitively if a Scorpion-based offer is on the table.

One industry source tells Aviation Week that the T-100 needed to be the low-cost option for the Air Force to have a fighting chance against Boeing and Lockheed.

Raytheon, which produced the T-1A Jayhawk and T-6A Texan II, exited the aircraft manufacturing business in 2006 when it sold Hawker Beechcraft, now owned by Textron Aviation. The firm would have been Leonardo’s U.S. face for the T-100, acting as prime system integrator and driving toward 70% American content on the aircraft.

[Isgrimnur]

Aviationist

On Sept. 16, acting Secretary of the Air Force Matthew Donovan announced the T-X has been officially named the T-7A “Red Hawk” during the Air, Space and Cyber conference underway at the National Harbor.

“The name, Red Hawk, honors the legacy of Tuskegee Airmen, and pays homage to their signature red-tailed aircraft from World War II.

The name is also a tribute to the Curtiss P-40 Warhawk, an American fighter aircraft that first flew in 1938 and was flown by the 99th Fighter Squadron, the U.S. Army Air Forces’ first African American fighter squadron” says an official news release.
...
The T-X is the name of the a new advanced jet trainer developed by Boeing Defense, Space & Security in partnership with Saab Group, selected on Sept. 27, 2018 as the winner of the T-X program to replace the Northrop T-38 Talon.

The new aircraft is powered by a single General Electric Aviation F404 engine (the same engine used by the Saab Gripen C/D and legacy F/A-18) and has a design similar to the F/A-18, with leading-edge root extensions (LERX) and twin tails that can provide high performance training for pilots that will fly US front-line fighters. The cockpit features a touchscreen large-area display (LAD), digital Up-Front Controller (UFC) and standby instruments, Hands On Throttle And Stick (HOTAS) controls and a low profile Head-Up Display (HUD), much like the F-35 cockpit or the proposed cockpits for Boeing’s F/A-18E/F Block III and F-15X and Saab’s Gripen E. The aircraft is slated to offer advanced training capabilities, including data links, smart weapons, simulated radar and LVC (live virtual constructive) capabilities.