A T-7A Red Hawk in flight at Edwards Air Force Base, Calif., on Feb. 2, 2025. The T-7A Red Hawk will become the primary trainer for Air Education and Training Command. (Chase Kohler/U.S. Air Force)
Lt. Col. Michael Trott has already achieved his childhood dream of becoming an Air Force pilot. Now he’s preparing to mark a milestone in the Air Force’s goal to modernize pilot training.
Trott, call sign “Hyde,” will be the first to fly the service’s T-7A Red Hawk training aircraft to San Antonio, where his squadron will begin the final sprint to integrating the plane as the primary trainer for Air Force pilots.
“I am completely humbled and honored to be in the position that I am,” said Trott, commander of the 99th Flying Training Squadron, which is responsible for training pilot instructors at Joint Base San Antonio-Randolph Air Force Base in Texas.
“All of my initial cadre have tens — if not hundreds — of hours already in the simulator,” he said. “We are very excited to get the aircraft here and start flying it.”
Originally scheduled to arrive Friday, the Red Hawk’s flight from St. Louis — where it’s fresh from a Boeing plant — was postponed because of weather conditions. Trott will first go to St. Louis and train with Boeing pilots before one accompanies him for the flight to Texas.
“Air Education and Training Command stands ready to receive the T-7A Red Hawk once weather conditions and operational schedules align,” the command said in a statement Thursday.
The new plane bears a distinct red tail, which emphasizes its name honoring the Tuskegee Airmen, the military’s first Black pilots and support personnel who served during World War II. American bomber crews nicknamed the planes of the Tuskegee Airmen the “Red Tails” because they had the color painted across the vertical stabilizers of their fighters.
“We intend to continue the legacy of breaking barriers and challenging assumptions by utilizing the advanced capabilities of the T-7 training system,” Trott said. “The 99th will rewrite what pilot production looks like and shape the future of pilot training for the next generation of warfighters in America.”
In anticipation of his flight, Trott spoke with reporters last week about his own preparations to be the squadron’s first pilot to fly the Red Hawk and what the next two years of preparation will look like to get the platform ready to host its first wave of training in fall 2027.
After getting through paperwork and maintenance required to receive a new aircraft, preparations will focus on the support infrastructure needed to get the plane into a flying state, Trott said. Pilots will then begin to fly the Red Hawk locally.
“We’ve got a game plan and training plan for what that looks like. That’ll also include the [simulators] that are here already delivered and set up. There will be a training plan that we do from the aircrew side to get all of the initial cadre qualified on the aircraft,” he said.
Meanwhile, the maintenance side of the house will kick off training next month for the first 39 maintainers to work on the Red Hawk. The course runs through June, said Jillian Watson, a member of the senior executive service and the director of logistics, engineering and force protection.
“We’re looking forward to starting them off with the basics of things like crew chief, so that will involve some classroom time for standards, procedures, normal maintenance safety operations, things like that,” she said. “Then we will actually use the aircraft that will be stationed here as part of the maintenance training curriculum for them as they do familiarization training.”
When that is completed, the service will start looking toward other bases that will receive the Red Hawk. Columbus Air Force Base in Mississippi is next in line with a 2027 arrival estimate, followed by Laughlin Air Force Base in Texas in 2032. Vance Air Force Base in Oklahoma will get the Red Hawk in 2034, and Sheppard Air Force Base in Texas a year later.
“I have to say, from a maintenance perspective, we’re very much looking forward to an airframe of this century,” Watson said.
The Red Hawk is replacing the T-38C Talon, which was originally designed in the early 1960s. Over time, it has become less suited to prepare pilots to fly the platforms in use now, and those expected in the future.
“The T-38, it’s old enough [that] people’s grandparents have worked on that plane. From a maintenance perspective, it’s nice to be working with a glass cockpit aircraft with new systems,” Watson said.
Eventually, the Air Force will have more than 350 Red Hawks, and the program will grow to replace the service’s other training platform, the T-6 Texan, which came into use in 2000.
Randolph will receive a second Red Hawk in January, Watson said.
By August 2027, Randolph should have 14 planes, Trott said. That fall, future instructor pilots will begin training on the Red Hawk. Those newly minted instructors will then go to the service’s undergraduate pilot training bases to begin integrating the Red Hawk into the Air Force’s pilot training.
But before the first class of future instructors arrive at Randolph, the 99th squadron will work with the aircraft to learn how it performs and what the syllabus should look like, Trott said.
“An example would be basic fighter maneuvers. We know that that is going to be part of our syllabus that we need to execute with the T-7,” he said. “How does the T-7 handle? What speed do we want to be when we do our break turn? What tactics, techniques and procedures do we want to codify in our manuals.”
This work, he said, will build out the next three to four decades of pilot training.
