A Northrop Grumman-led team is dashing its plan to propose a modifiedBAE Systems Hawk trainer for the U.S. Air Force’s T-38 replacement program, opting instead for a clean-sheet design for the $1 billion program.
The shift is more bold than it is surprising. The team is paying for a brand-new prototype despite a slump in defense spending. But it has become increasingly evident that the Hawk is unsuited for the mission due to shortfalls in the fast-jet trainer’s ability to sustain Gs, perform high angle-of-attack maneuvering and execute tight turn rate and radius.
Scaled Composites, wholly owned by Northrop Grumman since its purchase in 2007, formed a small team to build a suitable aircraft from the ground up.
This marks the third U.S. company to propose its own new-build aircraft for a competition that began with three foreign-built, modified off-the-shelf designs: the Hawk,Lockheed Martin/Korea Aerospace Industries T-50 and General Dynamics/Alenia Aermacchi M-346. Boeing planned since entering the competition to offer a new-build design; it is teamed with Saab. Textron Airland is looking at three variants of its company-developed Scorpion demonstrator for the T-X mission, says President Bill Anderson. Boeing declined to comment about progress on its prototype.
BAE’s Hawk (bottom) would struggle to meet sustained G, high angle of attack and tight turn radius requirements sought in the U.S. Air Force’s T-38 (top) replacement program. Credit: Jim Wilson/BAE Systems

The Air Force has been openly pursuing a T-X plan since 2011, but the fiscal 2016 budget proposal sent to Congress Feb. 2 indicates that a request for proposals will finally be released in fiscal 2016. The plan calls for $575 million in fiscal 2016-19, with an estimated total program cost at $1.04 billion and a source selection by the end of fiscal 2017. The winner stands to dominate a global fast-jet trainer market, especially for countries planning to buy the F-35. Nine partners already are teamed to develop the stealthy fighter and another three are foreign military sales customers.
The so-called T-X will eventually be used to train future F-22 and F-35 pilots with advanced skills. Adding to the requirements is an Air Force decision in the fiscal 2016 budget plan to expand T-X to cover a requirement for a new “red air” aggressor “stores aircraft interface” kit to include adding a radar, datalink and hard points for weapons and a jamming pod. The T-X aggressors will replace F-16Cs used in that role now at the Air Warfare Center at Nellis AFB, Nevada. The Hawk would be unable to meet the demands of an aggressor aircraft.
The “red air” T-X is needed to tax the technology and skills of future F-22 and F-35 pilots, says Col. Adrian Spain, commandant of the Air Force Weapons School at Nellis. During live-fly training, the aggressors not only use enemy tactics but the aircraft must also emulate adversary platforms well enough to “fool” the Air Force’s aircraft into “thinking” they are an actual enemy system.
“The potential near-peer threat has improved pretty substantially over the last decade, [and] we want to be able to replicate that threat here so we can train against a threat that is realistic and relevant,” Spain tells Aviation Week. “With an older, fourth-gen system, you can probably trick it into thinking [an aggressor] is something else. But in an F-35 and an F-22, the sensors are advanced enough that they’ll know the difference. So we need to have capability on the range to fly against.”
Budget cuts forced the service to deactivate a squadron of F-15Cs last year, leaving only one F-16C aggressor squadron for advanced tactics and pilot training of U.S. and allied pilots at Nellis’s Air Warfare Center.
The Air Force budget proposes to begin funding for the aggressor modification kit in fiscal 2018; a total of $220.5 million is included through fiscal 2020 for the work.
The challenge is for a T-X aircraft to emulate the fifth-generation aircraft qualities without accruing the high cost of replicating them. “As a team—and I want to stress with you that everything was as a team—we entered the fight with the Hawk and as time went on . . . we just kept an eye on the requirements,” says Marc Lindsley, Northrop Grumman’s T-X program director. “And as we saw the requirements evolve and become more clear, we looked at options. It became more and more clear to us that the Hawk wasn’t the optimum solution in terms of requirements and affordability. . . . So we started studying it.”