Laughlin says goodbye to last T-1 as Jayhawk retirement continues

Laughlin Air Force Base in Texas bid farewell to its last T-1A Jayhawk last month, as the Air Force continues its drive to retire the heavy aircraft trainer.

Laughlin’s last Jayhawk, from the 86th Flying Training Squadron, took off from the base Dec. 17. It joined a pair of T-6A Texan IIs and a pair of T-38C Talons as the centerpiece of a five-plane flyover, which twice passed over Laughlin’s airfield and air traffic control tower. After the other planes split off, the T-1 continued to its final resting place at “The Boneyard,” an airplane graveyard at Davis-Monthan Air Force Base in Arizona.

“We stand on the shoulders of giants,” Lt. Col. Nathan Hedden, commander of the 86th, said in a Thursday release. “All of the [pilots] who have done this before have left a legacy of excellent performance and excellent training. This unit has offered so much to the Air Force.”

Airmen have learned the basics of piloting cargo planes or tanker aircraft by flying T-1s for more than three decades.

But the twin-engine jet — originally built by Raytheon subsidiary Beech — is aging, and the Air Force started paring down its fleet of 177 T-1s in 2023. The Air Force had 75 T-1s last year, and aims to further cut them to 53 in 2025 as the service prepares to bring on the new T-7A Redhawk trainer.

The Air Force said in early 2022, when announcing plans to start retiring the Jayhawk, that new pilot training techniques, such as virtual reality, would allow it to phase out the T-1. Improvements to the T-6 would also let aspiring pilots learn to fly mobility planes on a single aircraft, the Air Force said. This is allowing the service to retire the least-capable T-1s, which would otherwise need to have their engines replaced.

Aspiring Air Force pilots first fly the T-6 during undergraduate pilot training, and then roughly 900 students are selected to move on to learn to fly mobility aircraft. Under the old system, those students flew the T-1 for about five months before moving on to more mobility-specific lessons. But the Air Force is moving to a simulator-based system that allows those students to learn advanced flight skills much more quickly.

Laughlin’s 47th Flying Training Wing will keep teaching students to fly in the T-6 and T-38C Talon until the T-7 comes online.

The 99th Flying Training Squadron at Joint Base San Antonio-Randolph in Texas said goodbye to its last Jayhawk in July 2024, which also flew to Davis-Monthan for retirement.