Laughlin AFB has said goodbye to its last T-1A Jayhawk
January 7, 2025
The T-1A Jayhawk is a twin-engined jet trainer used in the advanced phase of US Air Force Joint Specialized Undergraduate Pilot Training for students selected to fly strategic/tactical airlift or tanker aircraft. It is a derivative of the Beechjet/Hawker 400A 7-9 passenger bizjet.
The US Air Force acquired 180 T-1As, and these are now in the process of being withdrawn, with no replacement. In the past, student pilots flew the T-6 for about seven months (96 flying hours), after which they would be selected for the fighter-bomber track (going on to the T-38 Talon) or the mobility track. The mobility track provided a five month training course on the T-1A, with about 65 live flying hours, and extensive simulator time.
In future airlift and tanker pilots will transition to their new types after flying the T-6 Texan and then undergoing a 75 day synthetic training phase under the Air Mobility Fundamentals-Simulator programme. This will be undertaken using the current T-1 simulator and a new, generic virtual-reality cockpit provided by Redbird Flight Simulations. Each undergraduate pilot training base will host four legacy T-1 simulators and eight Redbird systems.
This approach is controversial, and some believe that the experience of flying a multi-engined, multi-crew training aircraft provided invaluable experience of the crew resource management challenges that student pilots would encounter in the cockpits of their operational types.
But the Air Force is ‘hurting’ for T-1A instructors, and the type suffers from poor availability. The Air Force therefore planned to reduce its total T-1A fleet from 178 aircraft to 22 by Fiscal Year 2025, withdrawing the first 50 of these in 2022-2023.
The 99th Flying Training Squadron at Joint Base San Antonio-Randolph in Texas said goodbye to its last Jayhawk in July 2024.
At Laughlin AFB, the 86th FTS received its first T-1A on 19 November 1993, and built up to a full fleet receiving its final Jayhawk on 15 January 1995. Some 30 years later, Laughlin AFB held multiple sendoff events to commemorate the legacy of the aircraft. In its last full year of service, the T-1A flew more than 15,000 hours at Laughlin AFB.
The last T-1A Jayhawk to leave Laughlin was tail no. 346, an aircraft with ‘First Assignment Instructor Pilot’ heritage tail markings. This participated in a five-aircraft flyover with two T-6A Texan IIs, and two T-38C Talons, making two passes over the air traffic control tower and airfield, before the T-6As and T-38Cs split off and the T-1A continued alone on its final journey to ‘The Boneyard’ at Davis-Monthan AFB, Arizona.
