WASHINGTON — The Air Force is preparing to declare its T-7 Red Hawk training jet ready for production in days, following years of delays, an Air Force official overseeing the program told Breaking Defense in an exclusive interview.
The T-7 will train new generations of fighter and bomber pilots as it replaces the Air Force’s aging T-38 Talon, which entered service in 1961. But the production decision, also known as Milestone C, comes over two years later than initially projected, due both to design woes at Boeing and a service strategy to accelerate the program, as Breaking Defense previously reported.
“Milestone C is monumental,” Rodney Stevens, the Air Force’s program executive officer for training, said. “Essentially, what we’re saying is, we’re confident in the design of the aircraft that we have, and that we’re ready to start proving that we can produce the aircraft at rate to meet the inventory needs of Air Education and Training Command.”
Though Milestone C is a big step, the program can’t “rest on its laurels,” he added.
That’s because much work still lies ahead. Milestone C will use a phased approach, which Stevens said will help mitigate concurrency — an overlap between development and production, where unwelcome discoveries could spur design changes to the aircraft.
The Air Force will approve at least three production lots one by one, and continue individually greenlighting them “until we can close out all the associated test activities that remain,” Stevens said.
Stevens maintained that Boeing “is committed to the program wholly,” saying that the Air Force and industry team “have a clear understanding that we are driving towards our North Star together.”
Their goal is to reach initial operational capability, which is measured by delivering 14 aircraft that are ready to train new pilots, no later than November 2027, he said. That means the first pilots can begin training fully on the jets in 2028.
“We continue to make good progress on the program in close collaboration with the U.S. Air Force,” Dan Gillian, vice president and general manager of Boeing’s Air Dominance unit said in a statement to Breaking Defense.
“The T-7 program’s active management approach has allowed us to provide a production-ready configuration to the Air Force prior to low-rate initial production, further reducing future risk and accelerating the path to delivering this critical capability,” he continued. “We have delivered two aircraft into service at Joint Base San Antonio-Randolph along with the Ground Based Training System. Our focus continues to be on delivering this new critical training capability.”
Concurrency “Is Something We Carry”
Back in 2023, the Government Accountability Office issued a scathing assessment of the T-7 program, pointing to issues like the trainer’s escape system and flight control software that could further delay the Red Hawk’s fielding. The report additionally raised concerns of strain between Boeing and the Air Force, though a service official later pushed back on that assessment in an interview with Breaking Defense.
Asked about the remaining development work, Stevens explained that changes to the T-7’s escape system won’t push back the impending production decision. Although further testing remains, he said he is “confident … that we’re on a good trajectory for a safe escape system.”
Stevens also said that while refining the trainer’s flight control software doesn’t currently jeopardize the schedule, it’s something to keep an eye on. Future flight tests could reveal new issues when practicing maneuvers like a high angle of attack.
Still, he maintained that once pilots start flying the trainers in 2028, the T-7 “will be as good as, if not slightly better, from a flight sciences perspective — number of Gs it can pull, how fast it can go in those areas — [than the] T-38.”
Stevens said the aircraft’s capabilities will be “iteratively” expanded, and that additional software drops will come as needed to close out the aircraft’s engineering and manufacturing development (EMD) “in the 2029 timeframe.”
Despite the risk of overlapping development and production, Stevens said he is “not concerned about concurrency.”
“It’s something that we carry, but it’s something that we will manage very closely with AETC and then Boeing,” he said.
The trainer’s fixed-price contract — which has forced Boeing to absorb roughly $3.2 billion in losses on the program — can help ameliorate some of that risk, at least from a financial perspective.
Boeing will fix any “safety-critical items” discovered during flight tests or other issues that stop the T-7 from meeting AETC’s training requirements, Stevens said. But if a new problem doesn’t fall into either of those categories, he added, “then that’s a conversation that we would have with AETC.”
Stevens noted that Boeing has already offered to, “at no cost, look at opportunities to improve certain aspects of the T-7,” such as extending the aircraft’s range.
The Air Force is also offering Boeing new financial incentives to achieve certain targets in three main areas: completing EMD, becoming ready for production and fielding the ground-based training system.
According to Stevens, Boeing has hit 17 of 19 targets so far — roughly 90 percent. (He did not share how much money that success has earned the company.)
Stevens said the Air Force has “fully embraced” the active management strategy put in place by former Air Force acquisition boss Andrew Hunter, noting that it aligns with Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth’s directives to speed capabilities to the field.
“We have our challenges. It is difficult,” he said. “But it allows us to really robustly and actively manage the program through a mission-outcome lens.”
The T-7 Arrives
Boeing has now delivered two T-7s to Joint Base San Antonio-Randolph, Texas, where the 99th Flying Training Squadron became the first Air Force unit to receive the Red Hawk in a Jan. 9 ceremony.
Stevens said one aircraft, dubbed APT-5, will be used for “familiarization training,” where a Boeing test pilot will fly with instructor pilots from the 99th to get them acquainted with the Red Hawk. The other aircraft, APT-3, is being used to train maintainers.
The T-7 is currently restricted to flights with test pilots, in test airspace. An update planned for March will allow 99th pilots to start flying and familiarize themselves with the aircraft. Those pilots will get qualified on the aircraft through Type 1 aircrew training, which Stevens said will last into “early 2027.” Then in spring or summer 2027, the program will start the initial operational test and evaluation phase, where new weapons systems are measured for their operational effectiveness.
Stevens said three more aircraft are further slated for delivery this year. Two will be production-representative test jets, which the Air Force decided to buy last year to provide extra testing capacity. The third will be a developmental jet that will be converted to a test aircraft and delivered to Randolph following electromagnetic testing.
Once new trainees can start flying the T-7, Stevens said he was confident that the Red Hawk will be far more effective at equipping pilots to operate modern aircraft.
“The T-7 postures you … to more easily become a fourth-, fifth- or sixth-generation fighter pilot or bomber pilot,” Stevens said. “The T-7 today will offer so much more as it relates to what type of pilot [it] is going to produce starting in 2028, compared to the type of pilot that the T-38 produces today.”
But plenty of work remains: The Air Force expects to eventually own more than 300 copies of the jet.
“From a total of 351 aircraft, five have been delivered. So, we’ve got 346 to go,” Stevens said.
