Beechcraft Texan T1

In the early 1990s the United States Air Force and Navy set out to buy one new primary trainer for both services, to replace the Air Force’s Cessna T-37 jets and the Navy’s Beech T-34C Mentors, under the Joint Primary Aircraft Training System. Beech teamed with Pilatus of Switzerland and offered a much-modified Pilatus PC-9 turboprop, and in 1995 it won. Little of the Swiss aircraft survived the redesign: the American trainer gained a pressurised cockpit, Martin-Baker ejection seats, a stronger airframe built to take bird strikes, and a more powerful PT6A-68 engine. The first production aircraft flew at Wichita on 15 July 1998, and it was named the Texan II after the North American T-6 Texan on which American pilots had trained in the Second World War, the type the RAF knew as the Harvard.

The T-6A entered service with the US Air Force in 2001, and more than a thousand Texan IIs have since been built for the American services and a dozen other countries. Later versions brought a glass cockpit with multi-function displays, a head-up display and hands-on-throttle-and-stick controls, so that the cockpit behaves like a modern fast jet’s; the T-6C, built mainly for export, adds hardpoints under the wings. Its turboprop and four-bladed propeller give it a jet-like climb and a top speed of over 300 mph, at a fraction of a jet’s running cost.

In Britain the Texan arrived through the Military Flying Training System, under which Ascent, a joint venture of Lockheed Martin and Babcock, provides the RAF’s and Royal Navy’s training aircraft. Its partner Affinity Flying Training Services signed for ten T-6Cs in February 2016, and the first reached RAF Valley on Anglesey in 2018. As the Texan T1 it replaced the Short Tucano, retired in 2019, and four more were delivered in late 2020. No. 72 Squadron flies all fourteen at Valley, where student pilots spend their basic fast-jet course on the Texan before moving on to the Hawk T2 with No. IV(R) Squadron and then to the Typhoon or F-35.