Brenda Marie Rivers
The U.S. Air Force plans to select Hillwood Aviation for a contract to provide trainer aircraft as the service continues to assess potential updates to the Boeing T-7A Red Hawk, FlightGlobal magazine reported Friday.
The Air Force intends to rent a maximum of eight T-50A trainers jointly built by Lockheed Martin and Korea Aerospace Industries to address future pilot training needs.
T-50A is the Lockheed-KAI team’s entry for the Air Force’s T-X trainer competition which Boeing’s T-7A won.Â
As part of the Air Force’s “Reforge Proof of Concept†effort, the Air Combat Command plans to launch a five-year experiment to test next-generation trainers like the T-50A which have the capacity for over 3K sorties and 4.5K flight hours per year.
T-7A, which is under development and is slated to undergo potential modifications, will be unavailable for experimentation.
The first of the T-7A fleet is slated for delivery by 2023, according to the report.
