The Navy’s advanced jet trainer, the T-45 Goshawk, developed from the British Aerospace Hawk light attack/trainer aircraft, is a compromise airplane. A tailhook and launch bar transformed the Hawk into the Goshawk: a serviceable jet, but underpowered and with performance capabilities that increasingly do not reflect current tactical training requirements, such as a radar or the ability to refuel in flight.

Nevertheless, the T-45 has provided workman-like service for the Navy and Marine Corps, taking countless young pilots to the carrier for the first time. This is the crowning achievement for these students, and carrier qualifications, signify the moment they become naval aviators and head to the fleet to fly combat aircraft off the “boat.” The Goshawks, now long in the tooth, are due for replacement.

The Navy has issued its requirements for the T-45 replacement and, not surprising to anyone who has followed naval aviation for the past 20 years, the request for information published by the Navy indicates that the trainer does not have to land or launch from the carrier. It merely has to do landing practices ashore and touch-and-go landings at sea.

This is not a surprise because three major naval aviation efforts in recent decades highlight the Navy’s increasing willingness to pursue “joint” (i.e., other services’) solutions instead of building aircraft that meet the Navy’s unique requirements.

The first (in order of service introduction) is the T-6 Texan II, a turboprop primary trainer meant to be the introductory aircraft for aspiring pilots and naval flight officers. Comparatively, the T-6’s sins are minor. The aircraft was designed with relatively weak landing gear when compared to the T-34C it was replacing in the Navy. This led to a lot of broken airplanes early on, and the need to extend outlying field runways to accommodate the ginger undercarriage. The plane also lacked beta, an ability to reverse the pitch of the propeller, which is found on the T-34 and fleet turboprops like the E-2 Hawkeye, leading to some minor changes in flight operations at primary training airfields. The aircraft also is arguably too complicated for its fairly basic mission. It has dual ejection seats and a canopy that prevents “hot switches” for aircrew, i.e., the ability to change flight crews with the engine still running, a handy capability when the goal is to send dozens of student aviators flying every day.

The second aircraft in the Navy’s pursuit of multiservice aircraft is the Marine Corps’ MV-22—a tilt-rotor aircraft that suffered countless setbacks during its development. The Osprey is monstrously complicated and very big compared to a helicopter, making it a poor substitute for the small, tough utility helicopters they never quite managed to replace. When the Navy started looking at the replacement for the C-2 Greyhound, it decided to adapt the Osprey rather than pursue a concept like Lockheed’s jet C-3, which would have provided more capability than the Osprey or the Greyhound, with a long range and high ceiling. In a world where the carrier may be operating at the end of its logistics tether in contested seas, the Navy picked a short-legged, lower speed, low-capacity aircraft instead of a long-range, faster jet aircraft.

Finally, there’s the F-35 Joint Strike Fighter (JSF). The program has been a disaster for the Navy, and there’s no two ways about it. I know that the aircraft has come a long way, has improved a lot over where it started, and the Navy’s decision to slow roll its acquisition of the JSF compared to the other services was probably wise. But the aircraft does not have a gun (irony of ironies for the service that created TOPGUN), is limited in afterburner, has a single engine, and relies on complicated technology for its primary attitude display. The aircraft depends on exquisite maintenance to maintain its stealthy signature, its panels cannot be opened on the carrier flight deck because of security concerns, and its engine slides out, rather than drops down, meaning that to pull its engine you need twice the length of the aircraft in hangar space on board the carrier!

The Navy currently operates only two aircraft designed from the ground up for shipboard usage instead of developed from Army or Air Force programs or from civilian airframes, those being the C-2 Greyhound and the E-2 Hawkeye. Those aircraft were designed in the 1960s. Every other aircraft in Navy service has come from other services or civilian projects (the FA-18 family, F-5, F-16, F-35, E-6, P-8, MH-53, MH-60, MQ-4, CMV-22, C-130, C-40, T-6, TH-57, T-44, T-45 . . . even the P-3 is based on the Lockheed Electra passenger aircraft). Many of these aircraft are perfectly “cromulent,” and deriving land-based or trainer aircraft from civilian designs is no great heresy, but the trend in naval aircraft is similar to those in ships, the Navy has moved away from setting its own requirements for what constitutes success and instead seeks to graft its requirements onto other platforms in hopes that they will fit the bill.

The Navy appears to have not learned any lessons from its pursuit of multiservice solutions, and with the T-45 replacement, it is making its biggest mistake yet.

The Navy’s trainer program likely is banking on riding the coattails of Boeing’s T-X, which has been purchased by the Air Force and named the T-7 Red Hawk. The T-7 likely will be an acceptable trainer for the Air Force, but the Navy essentially has written the requirements for the T-45 replacement to select the T-7, with a high top speed, high ceiling, and a lack of carrier capability.

Why the Navy would ask for a trainer that does not train pilots to do the one thing Navy pilots do that Air Force pilots do not requires a bit of an explanation.

Modern aircraft are really smart. Redundant flight control computers and advanced software make the aircraft’s flight control logic more intelligent than the human occupants, and in some instances the pilot’s control inputs are more like a suggestion of how he or she wants the aircraft to respond than a direct control of the airplane’s maneuvering surfaces.

Over the past decade, the Navy has been experimenting with using these capabilities to improve aviators’ ability to land on the carrier at sea. A system called Precision Landing Mode (PLM) in the Super Hornet uses the flight control computers and data from the aircraft carrier to drastically reduce the amount of pilot input required to land on the ship. This technology, which exists in a similar form in the F-35, has made carrier landings more reliable, safer, and more consistent. It has also triggered the Navy’s budget hawks to come up with some terrible ideas that have reached their apex in the T-45 replacement.

Naval aviation leadership has investigated whether carrier qualifications could be removed altogether for student pilots because, after all, once they get in the Super Hornet, they’ll get aboard the ship every time! In fact, PLM makes landing at the boat so easy, says the Navy, that we can get rid of most field carrier landing practice, a tedious affair in which pilots conduct practice landings on a runway painted to look like an aircraft carrier deck, mimicking the procedures at sea. The sages reason that with PLM available, there soon will not be a need to teach non-PLM (i.e., “manual”) flying to the ship ever again! (Side note: “manual” has a specific technical meaning in the Super Hornet, but I am using it as shorthand going forward.)

To those of us used to using Navy technology every day, this rings of an idea that works only on a PowerPoint slide. Do not misunderstand, the men and women who created and programmed PLM are doing their absolute best to make it work to add value to the fleet. And truth be told, it indeed has been valuable; PLM is amazing. Boarding rates have gone up, landings are more consistent, and PLM has shown a good ability to function in a variety of weather and landing conditions.

The flaw in PLM may not be in the software, however, but in the people using it. The first time a pilot and I used PLM at the ship, he gooned it up. Everything looked and felt wrong because we had been out of parameters when engaging the system, and so my pilot quickly turned PLM off and fell back on his manual habit patterns. We had practiced the difficult way of doing things so many times that it was routine when the easy way didn’t work out.

This is the fatal flaw of the T-45 replacement. Technology fails, sometimes in insidious ways. Every aviator has a story of how technology in the aircraft has failed him or her at a critical moment. Sometimes, this is caused by user error, sometimes it is a stray electrical signal, sometimes there are a precise series of conditions that are met, and sometimes the code is just wrong. But the technology always fails at some point, and when it does, the difference between good aviators and dead ones is that the good ones fall back on their training and good habit patterns to get themselves out of trouble.

What the non-carrier–capable T-45 replacement misses is the foundation of good habits at the ship. Assuming that a touch and go is the same as a trap and a cat is a decision that can only be reasonable to someone who has done neither. In all of naval history, there never has been a ramp strike (when a jet crashes into the back of the ship) on a planned touch and go. There have, however, been countless ramp strikes when pilots are trying to land aboard the ship with their tailhook down. When the pressure rises and getting aboard is a matter of life and death, landing aboard the ship becomes an intense physiological experience no matter what the computers in the aircraft are doing to help.

To assume that PLM will make getting aboard easier when technology fails, or when stress, or fear, or combat damage take a toll on the pilot, is to disregard the maxim that training should always be more difficult than the real thing.

I once had a colleague deride carrier landing practice as simply an administrative task that has to be performed before getting to the “real” mission of dropping bombs or shooting missiles. My response to him was that in the history of aviation, I would wager, more men and women have died performing this “administrative” task than in combat (according to Navy reports, the Navy lost 2,889 aircraft in WWII to enemy fire, compared to 4,390 flight losses from operational or other non-combat causes).

The first time we ask new aviators to come aboard the boat, they should be in small, stable, forgiving trainer aircraft, instead of multi-million dollar combat capable ones. The Super Hornet lands at 44,000lbs gross weight with a descent rate of over 700 feet per minute. The E-2D Hawkeye comes aboard at about 50,000lbs and has a wingtip clearance of only a few feet from the aircraft and personnel on the flight deck when it does. The Navy’s T-45 replacement RFP would have aviators trap for the first time ever in these beasts, instead of an aircraft comparable to the T-45’s 13,000lbs and 30 foot wingspan. The T-45 may be a compromise airplane, but at least it can perform naval aviation’s basic function in a safe manner (or at all!).

Beyond the pure violence of the cat shot and trap, there is important training in maneuvering an aircraft on the flight deck: following the flight director’s signals, taxiing to the catapult or out of the landing area, even walking around a crowded flight deck on the way to or from the aircraft is a skill.

The T-45 costs about $4,000 per flight hour, just over a third of what it costs to operate the FA-18 for an hour. Training command carrier qualifications represent a cost-effective way to determine whether a student is ready not just for landing at the boat, but for safe carrier operations in general. Moving this capability to the fleet may save a few dollars on aircraft (by buying an Air Force trainer) but will result in higher dollar costs to the fleet and will produce more pilots who may ultimately wash out of a Super Hornet or a Hawkeye than from a T-45.

Consider as well that CQ represents a flight student’s final evolution in flight school. Many pilots have described the immense feelings of pride and accomplishment that accompany completing CQ in the T-45 and exiting the aircraft to be presented with the wings of gold of a naval aviator. Tradition should not be a block for progress, but even the most strident transformationalist should admit that earning the naval aviator designation after completing naval aviation’s distinct flight requirement has a certain romance and gravitas that should not be lightly discarded. Will new aviators really feel that they have earned their wings after the completion of a few touch and gos?

Industry partners (Boeing primarily, but also Lockheed, Saab, Leonardo, and whoever else may bid for this contract) eyeing the new trainer order should contemplate what a non-carrier–capable design will mean for the young men and women who will fly them.

Including a tailhook, launch bar, and carrier-capable systems will be a luxury that, if PLM never, ever fails, will not be needed. However, a fundamental axiom in aviation is that “it is better to have a capability and not need it, than to need it and not have it.” If the Navy will not set the requirement for the T-45 replacement to land and launch from the carrier, then listen to one of your end users who may have to rely on the skill of those trained in the aircraft you build to survive aviation’s harshest “administrative procedure.” As a naval flight officer with thousands of flight hours, hundreds of traps, and more than a few close calls, I want my pilots trained to bring me home alive under any condition, I’m counting on you, our industry partners, to build an airplane that makes that happen. Do not build for the Navy’s penny-wise, dollar-foolish approach, build for the men and women who rely on your aircraft to fly, fight, win, and survive.

The Navy is chasing the Air Force’s trainer in the misguided attempt to save a few dollars. By removing from training the fundamental aspects of landing aboard the ship, i.e., actually landing and then launching again, the Navy kicks the can to fleet aircraft in hopes that it will save money on training sorties. What it may actually do is save in dollars what it will buy in the blood of young aviators who have no good habits to rely on when the technology fails them, as all technology does, when they least expect it.