You will be aware that we face a national emergency. I’m not referring to the fact that our closest ally has seemingly taken leave of its senses or the astonishing news that apparently one in four Britons is now disabled – nor that more than nine million of us of working age are economically inactive. I’m not even talking about the parlous state of the NHS.
The national emergency I’m referring to is one that trumps even Trump, so brace yourselves. Soon we are going to run out of Red Arrows.
The jolly red-painted planes they fly – the Hawk T1s made by BAE Systems – are now so old, they’re even older than Putin’s fighters. And while you can’t tell because of the highly polished crimson livery, they are increasingly expensive to maintain and probably getting a wee wobbly on their feet too. As a result of their extreme age, these methuselahs of the air are due to be retired in 2030 or soon after ‘in the 2030s’, presuming that a few more years can be eked out of their weary airframes. Already these iconic jets have been phased out of routine RAF training work – that happened in 2022. And that’s a problem because there is no replacement. Not a British one, anyway.
There is the Hawk T2, brought into service in 2009, of which we have some 28, on paper at least. However, these are needed to train our fighter pilots on the Typhoon or the new F-35 Lightning II – and already we have trainee pilots reportedly facing lengthy waiting times to get the cockpit hours in because we don’t have enough of them as it is. And we can’t get any more Hawk T2s because BAE Systems has stopped making them. This is an interesting decision for BAE to have taken since it boasts that it’s sold more than 1,000 Hawks to nations around the world since their introduction in the 1970s, making it their most successful plane.
So what are we going to do? Because it’s unthinkable that the Red Arrows could fly anything that wasn’t British, isn’t it? The ‘oohs’ and the ‘aaahhs’ just wouldn’t be the same if the world-renowned Diamond Nine was made up of Saabs, Dassaults or Lockheed Martins. The red, white and blue smoke would lose all its integrity if it emerged from the rear end of a Korean Aerospace Industries T-50 or an Aermacchi MB-339, perfectly serviceable though they doubtlessly are. It would be a national humiliation. After all, if the Americans, the Germans, the French, the Japanese, the Koreans, even the Italians, can muster a plausible national air display team furnished with jets made in their own countries, then why can’t we? Particularly when it’s the RAF’s world-famous Red Arrows that have performed some 5,000 displays in 57 countries since their formation in 1964. And aviation is still meant to be something we are ‘world class’ at.
If the Americans, the Germans, the French, the Japanese, the Koreans, even the Italians, can muster a plausible national air display team furnished with jets made in their own countries, why can’t we?
The question is why did BAE stop making training jets in the first place, given the enormous commercial success of the Hawk? One can only speculate that the combination of higher development costs and the dramatic retrenchment in defence spending after 1990 – when we spent 5 per cent of GDP – followed by the even more drastic cuts after the global financial crisis convinced them that there would never be a sufficient home market for the product.
But there is now. Because with the Red Arrows’ ageing Hawk T1s about to be grounded for good and with the number of Hawk T2s limited and due for retirement themselves in 2040, it’s easy to see the RAF ordering in a load more training jets soon. For a clue to the number, consider that as recently as 2017 the RAF had no fewer than 75 Hawk T1s in service.
Last month in the House of Commons the defence procurement minister Maria Eagle said that the government was ‘taking steps to consider what the alternatives might be’ for replacing the Hawk and that it would ‘consider any UK options that exist’. The good news is that there is at least one British-built version waiting in the wings – the Phoenix, a modular light jet made by a Bristol-based firm called Aeralis – but given how long these things take to get off the ground they would surely have to get their skates on to hit the early 2030s. Another option mooted is a trainer spin-off from the sixth generation fighter called Tempest that BAE is working on in partnership with firms in Italy and Japan, but that is surely a long way off – too long to help the Red Arrows.
So the race is on. What we know is that in five or six or seven years from now the venerable Red Arrows will be grounded or forced to rely on foreign-bought jet unless something is done. We can only hope that some of the £2.2 billion extra funding for defence announced by Chancellor Rachel Reeves last month is going towards a British-built replacement. Because if it’s not, then the ice creams of childhood won’t taste as sweet and, sure as eggs is eggs, that Buckingham Palace fly-past with the red, white and blue vapour trails won’t quite cut the mustard.
This is all besides the bigger point, of course: that our RAF fast-jet pilots need something really good to train in.
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