Which Aircraft to Train Tomorrow’s Top Gun Pilots? The U.S. Navy’s Next Jet Trainer Race Is On
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The U.S. Navy has issued a Request for Information for its next-generation Undergraduate Jet Training System, aimed at replacing the aging T-45 Goshawk under a faster schedule. The competition pits four industry teams with sharply different designs against an aggressive timeline that prioritizes digital training and early operational capability.
The Department of the Navy’s Program Executive Office, on March 31, 2025, issued a Request for Information for the Undergraduate Jet Training System to recapitalize the T-45 syllabus under an accelerated schedule focused on speed to initial operational capability and quality of training. The draft language points to a December 2025 RFP, a January 2027 award, carrier landing practice to wave-off only, and a four-tier ground-based training architecture that leans heavily on networking aircraft with simulators. Four companies, Boeing–Saab, KAI–Lockheed Martin, Leonardo, and Sierra Nevada Corporation, are already competing for this future contract. Delivering the future jet trainers to the U.S. Navy represents a great achievement, as the future Navy pilots, among the most skilled in the world, will be trained on these platforms. Beyond an industrial and technical success, it also represents a great communication opportunity: having such a known and reputed partner inside the sales portfolio would give the chosen company more arguments to convince other nations worldwide to buy the trainers.Follow Army Recognition on Google News at this link
T-45C Goshawk, the Navy’s carrier-capable jet trainer, pairs a glass cockpit and single Adour engine to teach carrier approaches, instruments, formation, and basic fighter maneuvering; its aging fleet is driving the UJTS replacement (Picture source: U.S. DoW).
That framing explains why four companies are rushing in. CNATRA’s current T-45C curriculum stacks instrument work, formation, BFM, intercepts, and basic strike events across Kingsville and Meridian, with heavy use of operational flight trainers and virtual desktop trainers to compress timelines. Mission profiles released with the RFI show sorties built around rapid climbs, high-G workups, section maneuvering, FCLP periods, and fuel reserves sized to keep the training cadence unforgiving and realistic. In short, the winner must deliver a cockpit and a training ecosystem that fits with the Navy infrastructure.
Boeing and Saab’s T-7A Red Hawk is the most modern among the different candidates. Born digitally, the jet’s design, maintenance, and training content are tied together by a common data thread that has underpinned production for the U.S. Air Force. The aircraft uses a single GE F404 afterburning engine, with the prime citing envelope testing to Mach 0.975, 8G, and 45,000 feet as of late 2023. Saab emphasizes the glass cockpit, stadium seating, and embedded training architecture developed for USAF’s 350-aircraft program of record. For the U.S. Navy, the Boeing’s offer is clear: a digital trainer with a huge training community and a long upgrade runway.
The Navy’s draft spec requires only FCLP to wave off, not full shipboard carrier quals, but UJTS will still live at humid coastal bases, fly repeated low-altitude patterns, and demand robust approach-power handling and corrosion protection. The T-7A was optimized for land-based USAF ops. Adapting it to Navy peculiarities carries schedule and integration risk, though the program’s digital toolkit and open-systems approach could speed changes to flight control laws, arresting-hook geometry for field work, and interfaces with the Navy’s LVC backbone.
Video of the T-7A’s first flight with a U.S. Air Force pilot (Source: Boeing).
Textron Aviation and Leonardo’ answer is the M-346N, a navalized take on a twin-engine trainer with a large installed base in Italy, Israel, Poland, and Singapore. The M-346 series uses two F124-GA-200 turbofans, is certified to +8/-3G with a 45,000-foot ceiling, and was designed around high-angle-of-attack training with aggressive carefree handling. Leonardo also fields the M-346FA light fighter, adding a Grifo-M346 radar and weapon options, which gives the family a mature embedded-tactics framework.
The twin-engine layout is not trivial in a training fleet that spends much of its life at low altitude, in the pattern, and over water. Redundant powerplants mitigate engine-out risk and can shave mishap rates, a useful consideration for a syllabus that drives repeated practice PAs and touch-and-goes. CNATRA’s matrix packs BFM, intercepts, and strike mechanics into compressed blocks that lean on sims to build repetition; the M-346’s mature LVC hooks and high-fidelity flight control laws map neatly to that rhythm. The trade is the cost and shipping an Italian airframe into a U.S. Navy ecosystem.
Leonardo M-346N, a twin-engine advanced jet trainer with digital avionics and high-angle-of-attack capability, offers realistic fighter handling and strong safety margins, making it a leading contender for the Navy’s next-generation training system (Picture source: Textron Aviation).
Korea Aerospace Industries, working with Lockheed Martin, brings the T-50N/TF-50N, a navalized pitch from a supersonic family already in frontline service across Asia and Eastern Europe. The baseline T-50 runs a 17,700-pound-thrust F404 and is rated to around Mach 1.5 with +8G limits, reflecting its roots as a mini-F-16 with digital fly-by-wire. The team has been openly marketing the TF-50N for UJTS, positioning it as a fast-jet bridge from classroom to fleet. The selling points are a proven jet, a deep export base, and a U.S. industrial tie-up that could localize final assembly and sustainment.
Where the T-50 family helps instructors is energy and radar work. The type’s lead-in fighter trainer and light-attack derivatives carry radar and a gun, allowing a syllabus to practice air-to-air intercept mechanics with authentic kinematics and sensor timelines even if the Navy ultimately flies the pure trainer fit. Naval adaptation remains a fair question: the airframe was not born for saltwater environments or repeated carrier pattern pounding, and tailoring flight controls for Navy pattern work would need careful demonstration to de-risk the field-carrier landing practice requirement.
Presentation video of a training with the T-50N (Source: Lockheed Martin)
Then there is Sierra Nevada Corporation’s Freedom Trainer, a naval-centric concept unveiled this year as a family of systems built around a digital model from aircraft to desktop. SNC says Freedom was engineered for UJTS requirements from minute one, touting synchronized software loads across jets and devices, a long-life airframe, and engine operating cost advantages. The company has described a design harmonized around the Williams International FJ44 powerplant and an expected 16,000-hour airframe life, while signaling it can still demonstrate carrier touch-and-go proficiency if the Navy ever restores that requirement.
That naval-first pitch resonates with the RFI’s ground-based training emphasis. The Navy wants to mix operational flight trainers, unit training devices, cockpit procedural trainers, and desktop avionics trainers, then tie them to live jets and up to 75 constructive adversaries during LVC events. SNC’s trainer jet attracts when requirements evolve, but it also must clear design, test, and certification gates quickly enough to match the Navy’s aggressive IOC timeline. That is a tall order in a program that wants the first test jet delivered three years after contract award.
SNC Freedom Trainer is a clean-sheet, naval-optimized jet with advanced digital systems and low operating costs, is designed to integrate seamlessly with the Navy’s live-virtual-constructive training network (Picture source: SNC).
The Navy is buying how students think as much as what they fly. CNATRA’s strike and E-2 advanced tracks carve out extensive instrument work, section tactical formation, target-area mechanics, BFM, fighter intercepts, and carrier pattern evolutions, with programmed hours split roughly across academics, sims, dual flights, and solo events. The RFI’s sample missions include high-power G-warm sequences, SEM, and FCLP periods inside tight fuel margins, sharpening decision-making under pressure. In that context, the supersonic T-50 family offers the most “fighter-like” energy picture, the M-346 brings forgiving but demanding handling with twin-engine resilience, the T-7A supplies a digital backbone already fielded at scale, and Freedom promises a naval-centric cockpit and software stack built explicitly for LVC saturation.
Geopolitics and industry weigh just as much as aerodynamics. Choosing a U.S.-led design such as T-7A or SNC’s Freedom Trainer reinforces domestic jobs and supply chains while simplifying security accreditation across the training enterprise. A KAI-Lockheed selection would deepen ties with a key ally already delivering FA-50s to multiple U.S. partners, but it introduces a foreign-built airframe into Navy schoolhouses alongside U.S. sustainment and tech-data expectations. Picking Leonardo’s M-346 leverages an aircraft already teaching NATO pilots and could speed early training quality while balancing European industrial relationships. Congress will watch these fault lines closely, since UJTS is as much a software and simulator network as it is a jet.
The Navy wants an end-to-end training weapon system that can move students from ground school to complex intercepts with fewer seams, more networking, and less time lost to maintenance and rescheduling. In that race, Red Hawk’s digital pedigree, TF-50N’s velocity and export maturity, M-346N’s twin-engine conservatism, and Freedom’s naval-first architecture are four sharply different answers to the same problem. The service has engineered the competition so that the winner is not just the most capable airplane on paper but the jet whose ecosystem best teaches the next generation to fight.
Written by Evan Lerouvillois, Defense Analyst, Army Recognition Group.
Evan studied International Relations, and quickly specialized in defense and security. He is particularly interested in the influence of the defense sector on global geopolitics, and analyzes how technological innovations in defense, arms export contracts, and military strategies influence the international geopolitical scene.
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The U.S. Navy has issued a Request for Information for its next-generation Undergraduate Jet Training System, aimed at replacing the aging T-45 Goshawk under a faster schedule. The competition pits four industry teams with sharply different designs against an aggressive timeline that prioritizes digital training and early operational capability.
The Department of the Navy’s Program Executive Office, on March 31, 2025, issued a Request for Information for the Undergraduate Jet Training System to recapitalize the T-45 syllabus under an accelerated schedule focused on speed to initial operational capability and quality of training. The draft language points to a December 2025 RFP, a January 2027 award, carrier landing practice to wave-off only, and a four-tier ground-based training architecture that leans heavily on networking aircraft with simulators. Four companies, Boeing–Saab, KAI–Lockheed Martin, Leonardo, and Sierra Nevada Corporation, are already competing for this future contract. Delivering the future jet trainers to the U.S. Navy represents a great achievement, as the future Navy pilots, among the most skilled in the world, will be trained on these platforms. Beyond an industrial and technical success, it also represents a great communication opportunity: having such a known and reputed partner inside the sales portfolio would give the chosen company more arguments to convince other nations worldwide to buy the trainers.
Follow Army Recognition on Google News at this link
T-45C Goshawk, the Navy’s carrier-capable jet trainer, pairs a glass cockpit and single Adour engine to teach carrier approaches, instruments, formation, and basic fighter maneuvering; its aging fleet is driving the UJTS replacement (Picture source: U.S. DoW).
That framing explains why four companies are rushing in. CNATRA’s current T-45C curriculum stacks instrument work, formation, BFM, intercepts, and basic strike events across Kingsville and Meridian, with heavy use of operational flight trainers and virtual desktop trainers to compress timelines. Mission profiles released with the RFI show sorties built around rapid climbs, high-G workups, section maneuvering, FCLP periods, and fuel reserves sized to keep the training cadence unforgiving and realistic. In short, the winner must deliver a cockpit and a training ecosystem that fits with the Navy infrastructure.
Boeing and Saab’s T-7A Red Hawk is the most modern among the different candidates. Born digitally, the jet’s design, maintenance, and training content are tied together by a common data thread that has underpinned production for the U.S. Air Force. The aircraft uses a single GE F404 afterburning engine, with the prime citing envelope testing to Mach 0.975, 8G, and 45,000 feet as of late 2023. Saab emphasizes the glass cockpit, stadium seating, and embedded training architecture developed for USAF’s 350-aircraft program of record. For the U.S. Navy, the Boeing’s offer is clear: a digital trainer with a huge training community and a long upgrade runway.
The Navy’s draft spec requires only FCLP to wave off, not full shipboard carrier quals, but UJTS will still live at humid coastal bases, fly repeated low-altitude patterns, and demand robust approach-power handling and corrosion protection. The T-7A was optimized for land-based USAF ops. Adapting it to Navy peculiarities carries schedule and integration risk, though the program’s digital toolkit and open-systems approach could speed changes to flight control laws, arresting-hook geometry for field work, and interfaces with the Navy’s LVC backbone.
Video of the T-7A’s first flight with a U.S. Air Force pilot (Source: Boeing).
Textron Aviation and Leonardo’ answer is the M-346N, a navalized take on a twin-engine trainer with a large installed base in Italy, Israel, Poland, and Singapore. The M-346 series uses two F124-GA-200 turbofans, is certified to +8/-3G with a 45,000-foot ceiling, and was designed around high-angle-of-attack training with aggressive carefree handling. Leonardo also fields the M-346FA light fighter, adding a Grifo-M346 radar and weapon options, which gives the family a mature embedded-tactics framework.
The twin-engine layout is not trivial in a training fleet that spends much of its life at low altitude, in the pattern, and over water. Redundant powerplants mitigate engine-out risk and can shave mishap rates, a useful consideration for a syllabus that drives repeated practice PAs and touch-and-goes. CNATRA’s matrix packs BFM, intercepts, and strike mechanics into compressed blocks that lean on sims to build repetition; the M-346’s mature LVC hooks and high-fidelity flight control laws map neatly to that rhythm. The trade is the cost and shipping an Italian airframe into a U.S. Navy ecosystem.
Leonardo M-346N, a twin-engine advanced jet trainer with digital avionics and high-angle-of-attack capability, offers realistic fighter handling and strong safety margins, making it a leading contender for the Navy’s next-generation training system (Picture source: Textron Aviation).
Korea Aerospace Industries, working with Lockheed Martin, brings the T-50N/TF-50N, a navalized pitch from a supersonic family already in frontline service across Asia and Eastern Europe. The baseline T-50 runs a 17,700-pound-thrust F404 and is rated to around Mach 1.5 with +8G limits, reflecting its roots as a mini-F-16 with digital fly-by-wire. The team has been openly marketing the TF-50N for UJTS, positioning it as a fast-jet bridge from classroom to fleet. The selling points are a proven jet, a deep export base, and a U.S. industrial tie-up that could localize final assembly and sustainment.
Where the T-50 family helps instructors is energy and radar work. The type’s lead-in fighter trainer and light-attack derivatives carry radar and a gun, allowing a syllabus to practice air-to-air intercept mechanics with authentic kinematics and sensor timelines even if the Navy ultimately flies the pure trainer fit. Naval adaptation remains a fair question: the airframe was not born for saltwater environments or repeated carrier pattern pounding, and tailoring flight controls for Navy pattern work would need careful demonstration to de-risk the field-carrier landing practice requirement.
Presentation video of a training with the T-50N (Source: Lockheed Martin)
Then there is Sierra Nevada Corporation’s Freedom Trainer, a naval-centric concept unveiled this year as a family of systems built around a digital model from aircraft to desktop. SNC says Freedom was engineered for UJTS requirements from minute one, touting synchronized software loads across jets and devices, a long-life airframe, and engine operating cost advantages. The company has described a design harmonized around the Williams International FJ44 powerplant and an expected 16,000-hour airframe life, while signaling it can still demonstrate carrier touch-and-go proficiency if the Navy ever restores that requirement.
That naval-first pitch resonates with the RFI’s ground-based training emphasis. The Navy wants to mix operational flight trainers, unit training devices, cockpit procedural trainers, and desktop avionics trainers, then tie them to live jets and up to 75 constructive adversaries during LVC events. SNC’s trainer jet attracts when requirements evolve, but it also must clear design, test, and certification gates quickly enough to match the Navy’s aggressive IOC timeline. That is a tall order in a program that wants the first test jet delivered three years after contract award.
SNC Freedom Trainer is a clean-sheet, naval-optimized jet with advanced digital systems and low operating costs, is designed to integrate seamlessly with the Navy’s live-virtual-constructive training network (Picture source: SNC).
The Navy is buying how students think as much as what they fly. CNATRA’s strike and E-2 advanced tracks carve out extensive instrument work, section tactical formation, target-area mechanics, BFM, fighter intercepts, and carrier pattern evolutions, with programmed hours split roughly across academics, sims, dual flights, and solo events. The RFI’s sample missions include high-power G-warm sequences, SEM, and FCLP periods inside tight fuel margins, sharpening decision-making under pressure. In that context, the supersonic T-50 family offers the most “fighter-like” energy picture, the M-346 brings forgiving but demanding handling with twin-engine resilience, the T-7A supplies a digital backbone already fielded at scale, and Freedom promises a naval-centric cockpit and software stack built explicitly for LVC saturation.
Geopolitics and industry weigh just as much as aerodynamics. Choosing a U.S.-led design such as T-7A or SNC’s Freedom Trainer reinforces domestic jobs and supply chains while simplifying security accreditation across the training enterprise. A KAI-Lockheed selection would deepen ties with a key ally already delivering FA-50s to multiple U.S. partners, but it introduces a foreign-built airframe into Navy schoolhouses alongside U.S. sustainment and tech-data expectations. Picking Leonardo’s M-346 leverages an aircraft already teaching NATO pilots and could speed early training quality while balancing European industrial relationships. Congress will watch these fault lines closely, since UJTS is as much a software and simulator network as it is a jet.
The Navy wants an end-to-end training weapon system that can move students from ground school to complex intercepts with fewer seams, more networking, and less time lost to maintenance and rescheduling. In that race, Red Hawk’s digital pedigree, TF-50N’s velocity and export maturity, M-346N’s twin-engine conservatism, and Freedom’s naval-first architecture are four sharply different answers to the same problem. The service has engineered the competition so that the winner is not just the most capable airplane on paper but the jet whose ecosystem best teaches the next generation to fight.
Written by Evan Lerouvillois, Defense Analyst, Army Recognition Group.
Evan studied International Relations, and quickly specialized in defense and security. He is particularly interested in the influence of the defense sector on global geopolitics, and analyzes how technological innovations in defense, arms export contracts, and military strategies influence the international geopolitical scene.
