For crying out loud..the RAF Hawk T2 story is a pathetic expensive mess

If I wanted expensive trainers falling apart, I would have bought a pair of Nikes

There’s a particular kind of British scandal that doesn’t result in riots, but with a weary sigh, a Monster-Munch-scented fart, followed by a politely furious memo. The result is a long queue outside a very important hangar that never seems to open. Enter the RAF Hawk T2, the aircraft intended to produce razor-sharp fast-jet pilots with assembly-line efficiency, but instead became a masterclass in how to burn money, time, and credibility while insisting everything is “broadly on track.”

The T2 story isn’t just an expensive nightmare; it’s the sort of bureaucratic farce that would make even the Post Office blush. And it has proved, bafflingly, weirdly hard to sustain—like a home printer that only runs on Tuesdays (if there’s a Super Blue Blood Moon and Mercury is in Uranus). Let’s start with the lie it was built on: that it was a Hawk. The first-generation BAe Hawk was pretty fabulous, so getting funding for a British aircraft pretending to be a Hawk was easier than something with a new name. But when I spoke to Hawk pilot Paul Heasman, he noted, “Though outwardly similar, the new generation Hawk is largely a new aircraft. It is surprising to learn that the aircraft have only 10% commonality with the first-generation aircraft. The new variants have a new wing, forward and centre fuselage, fin and tailplane.”

The Hawk T2 was billed as a leap into the modern era: glass cockpit, digital avionics, mission systems that mimic the complexity of front-line Typhoons and F-35s, backed by a clever training system of simulators, courseware, and data-driven performance analysis. We were told this wasn’t just a new jet—it was a “synthetic training environment” wrapped around a sleek British airframe.

Fine words. The problem is that, in practice, the words turned out to be the most reliable part.

If you’re the RAF in 2025 and your advanced jet trainer keeps eating engines, the “better” aircraft isn’t the one with the most Union Jacks in the brochure—it’s the one that lets you keep producing Typhoon