The U.S. Air Force is requesting $235 million for the first production buy of seven Boeing [BA] T-7A Red Hawk trainers in fiscal 2025, yet the service said that the aircraft will not achieve initial operational capability (IOC) until the second quarter of fiscal 2028.
The program schedule had called for 14 T-7As to reach IOC in March 2026, and the Air Force subsequently revised that to January 2027.
The Air Force said that it expects the total buy of the digitally designed T-7As to be 346, five fewer than previously estimated. The planned fiscal 2025 procurement is seven fewer than foreseen in last year’s budget request. The program has faced deficiencies with the T-7A emergency escape system and on-board oxygen generating system. While the Air Force did not require the T-7A to have an Automatic Ground Collision Avoidance System, the program is to integrate AGCAS starting in fiscal 2026. The system steers the aircraft at low altitudes, if the pilot blacks out during high-G maneuvers.
In January, Boeing said that it had lost $1.6 billion last year on fixed price development contracts, including $275 million on the T-7A, $482 million on the VC-25A Presidential Aircraft, $309 million on the KC-46A, $288 million on NASA’s Commercial Crew astronaut transportation program, and $231 million on the Navy’s MQ-25 unmanned aerial refueling tanker (Defense Daily, Jan. 31).
In 2018, Boeing and its T-7A teammate Saab won an up to $9.2 billion contract for 351 T-7As to replace the Air Force’s T-38Cs by Northrop, now Northrop Grumman [NOC].
The T-7A’s advanced mission systems, a glass touchscreen cockpit, and stadium seating “will drastically improve training for the next generation of fighter and bomber pilots and will better prepare student pilots to advance into fourth and fifth generation fighter and bomber aircraft,” the Air Force has said.
Last year, Rep. Ronny Jackson (R-Texas) said that a shortage of
General Electric [GE] J85 engines has curtailed T-38C availability (Defense Daily, June 21, 2023).
“We talk about a pilot shortage, but what we actually have, in the active Air Force anyway, is a shortage of staff officers who are supposed to be pilots,” Air Force Secretary Frank Kendall said on March 8. “We have people to fly the airplanes. We don’t have a shortage of people who want to be pilots. The problem is the pipeline to produce them. The biggest impediment in that is the T-38 and its reliability. I recently visited the contractors involved in the T-38 engines, trying to accelerate the repair of those engines. It’s a very old airplane, and we’re waiting for the T-7 to come online to replace it.”