Air force spends millions sending crew to America and Italy to gain experience after fault leaves half the fleet of fast-jet trainers out of action
Britain is spending millions of pounds a year to send pilots overseas for training because the RAF does not have enough fast-jet training aircraft available, it can be revealed.
Problems with the Hawk T2 jets have resulted in less than half of the fleet being available for training in the UK because they cannot fly for too long without the engines “blowing up”, sources said.
As a result, the Ministry of Defence is having to pay the Americans and the Italians as much as £55 million over the next three years, around £2 million per pilot, so they can train them instead.
This is in addition to the roughly £5.4 million already spent on training each pilot in the UK, even though a large chunk of the training cannot be delivered. RAF sources said some money would be saved because the RAF did not have to pay for aircraft to be serviced or for fuel.
John Spellar, a Labour MP who sits on the defence select committee, said the Hawk programme had been “appallingly mismanaged by a stubborn RAF that will not get a grip of it”. He said the service should have invested in the next generation of training aircraft rather than allow pilots to be stuck in the training pipeline for years.
Former Air Marshal Edward Stringer, who was director of operations at the Ministry of Defence, said the RAF should have ensured there was a sufficient number of extra engines in case of such eventualities. He added that the pilot training programme was already “fragile” because of an “insufficient number of fast-jet pilots”.
In January last year it emerged the RAF had been forced to ground its entire fleet of Hawk T2 jets after the engines effectively “blew up” while on the runway at RAF Valley in North Wales, an RAF source said. It emerged there was an issue with the Rolls-Royce engine on the jet which involved the engine blades supplied by a French company wearing out.
The Commons defence select committee heard that a fault was reported within the engine as long ago as March 2022 which meant the aircraft could only fly for 1,700 hours, instead of the expected 4,000 hours. Although there are 28 Hawk T2 jets in the fleet, of which around 20 were planned to be available on a daily basis, only around eight of them were available each day throughout 2022-2023. The aircraft replaced the Hawk T1 jet in 2009.
Over a three-year period starting last year, a total of 15 RAF pilots will be trained on the Euro-NATO Joint Jet Pilot Training programme in the USA. This is in addition to six RAF pilots who were already being trained as part of a previously funded agreement. The course lasts 18 months and includes both basic and advanced flying training at a cost per trainee of around £2 million. Overseas training in the US was part of the UK pilot training before the issues arose with the Hawk T2’s engine, however sources confirmed that more pilots were now being trained in the US as a result of the problem.
Furthermore, the RAF is paying the Italians to train 12 of its pilots over three years at the International Flight Training School (IFTS) as a direct result of the Hawk problem. The first course of two trainees began in July 2023 and the course for advanced fast jet flying training is expected to last nine months. The cost per trainee is around £2.2 million, taking the total paid to Italy to £26.4 million for the training in Italy alone.
