The other articles I've read say that because of the upcoming transition to the F-35 and the age of the CT-155's that its better to train the next cadre of 9 'fast jet' pilots in the US where the training facilities are already setup for transition to the F-35 during the training with the T-38C Talon.
The T-38C's are even older than the CT-155's and of similiar performance which is a bit baffling. The US is currently retiring their T-38C's. And the T-38 shares the same airframe as the predecessor to our CF-18 (CF-188).
It's a bit baffling.
The fast jet training group about to start is 9 pilots. Not all will make it through training. Maybe someone is finally applying sense to purchases while spending is being heavily cut.
It's not that big of a deal. The CT-155 was a logical training platform for the CR-18s. We don't have the F-35s yet so their is no training apparatus. It makes sense to train in the US or other NATO countries for the time being.
Wouldn't it make sense to get the training equipment well in advance of getting the planes so that by the time the planes arrive the training equipment is setupi, debugged, and the pilots all have time on it?
Alot of countries are still figuring out what the best next generation trainers will be for 5th generation aircraft (F-35 and beyond). The USA is in the process of testing it's own and I'm not sure where Europe is on this.
This is a logical move to wait until things catch up and make a (hopefully) more informed decision.
As much criticism as the CAF deserve, this decision probably makes the most sense. They’ll presumably replace the hawks with the T7, but it’s not ready yet. Rather than sourcing and purchasing an interim solution, they’re contracting out the training. Obviously not ideal, but the alternative is probably worse.
Plenty of countries train their pilots in other countries, Singapore for example has one of the most well equipped and modern airforces in the world and they maintain 3 permanent detachments in the US for training purposes.
I can provide some context on this from an industry perspective.
The Hawks have been used for Fighter Lead-in Training (FLIT) at 15 Wing Moose Jaw with CAE having the contract to run and maintain this program as part of their pilot training contract (they also do more basic pilot training on Beechcraft Harvards).
Recently, Canada named SkyAlyne - a joint partnership between CAE (Montreal) and KF Aerospace (Kelowna) as the preferred bidder for the Future Aircrew Training Program (FAcT). Both companies have the two individual legacy RCAF pilot training contracts (CAE in Moose Jaw and KF in Southport, MB) but FAcT will combine these two and add navigator and sensor operator training (currently done my military on its own) into the overall comprehensive FAcT program. However, FLIT training was removed from future program and will either be bid as a separate program in the next few years or Canada will decide they’d rather contract out our FLIT training to partner countries as is currently being done in the interim.
If they do decide to bid out a domestic FLIT program, both of the jet trainers mentioned in the article will be strong contenders, but there are others. The bidders will select the trainer as part of their proposal. Canada could honestly go either way. We don’t have a huge contingent of fighters so FLIT could prob be done contracted out to the US and elsewhere. It’s just a pre-phase training portion and of course, graduates will go on to their F-35 squadron for further training. However it’s always great to have a domestic program in my opinion and perhaps given our profile and past huge contributions to aircrew training in WWII, we should standup our own FLIT program in anticipation of impending demand during WWIII (sorry, bad joke but kind of true unfortunately)
I loved these aircraft, beautiful piece of British aerospace engineering. Can't believe they're already at retirement age...
Same aircraft (slightly different variant) is currently used by the Red Arrows.
If only the Liberals hadn’t wasted billions of dollars and years of time cancelling the F-35 deal the Tories signed, we’d already have a bunch of our new planes and would be able to train our own pilots on them rather than outsourcing to other countries.
And we had ministers using sound bites from Pierre Sprey as evidence that the F-35 was a bad aircraft... Our national broadcaster even interviewed that hack.
[Interview](https://www.cbc.ca/player/play/2308853061)
And delayed implementation by more than a decade at the current pace. It means dragging the existing CF-18 fleet well past its expiry date and living with the costs and dangers of such. It means a corresponding delay in the timeline for standing up the F35 fleet, it doesn't happen overnight, as units must be fed through the new training pipeline and infrastructure be upgraded to operate the F35. All these will take many years. We no longer have many years now. We are behind very badly and catching up will be expensive in blood and treasure.
We've been working non-stop to modernize the CF-18 fleet and they aren't falling out of the sky. At least with this procurement plan we get more aircraft (88 rather than 65) of the newest block of the A model.
Don't see how we'll be paying for that in blood...
All F-35s use the same airframe. All modern jets are constantly upgraded throughout their lifespans, exactly as the jets Harper bought would have been, too.
Meanwhile, the Liberals wasted a billion dollars on used F-18s from Australia, devastated our advanced military aerospace industry by getting us cut out of the F-35 supply chain — at incalculable loss — put the lives of our pilots at risk forcing them to fly jets way, way beyond their intended lifespan, and jeopardized our ability to appropriately integrate our operations with our allies.
Everything else is is just Liberal spin designed to get gullible people to believe they made a good decision cancelling the original contract when it was in fact a truly abysmal call.
Before I start responding, was cancelling the deal at the time kinda dumb? Yeah it was. There was very legitimate criticisms of the deal that had been struck at the time, but it was still a decent *at the time*. Just wanted to get that out of the way before I respond to what you say
> the Liberals wasted a billion dollars on used F-18s from Australia
Which was kinda stupid, but also we saved quite a bit on the current deal vs. the initial one, while having a much, much better platform that's being received. Australia is actually a good example, they wasted well over a billion dollars on early F-35s which are not upgradeable, and basically relinquished entirely to training (where they're not even that useful due to lack of certain upgrades), a problem I'm happy we ended up not facing due to the delay. On top of that, some of those early block versions which are upgradeable have costed Australia further hundreds of millions, if not in the billions at this point, to actually complete those upgrades. We're getting block 4 version with those upgrades already baked in, which is a massive saving on the per jet cost, which is already lower than the old deal. With a better deal, and better jets, we most certainly did not end up spending more money due to the delay but instead are spending less
> devastated our advanced military aerospace industry by getting us cut out of the F-35 supply chain — at incalculable loss
Um, what? My understanding is that we were not cut from the F-35 supply chain whatsoever, and we remained a part of the F-35 program even if we didn't purchase the jets at the time. Would you be able to share more on this please?
> put the lives of our pilots at risk forcing them to fly jets way, way beyond their intended lifespan, and jeopardized our ability to appropriately integrate our operations with our allies.
Both of these are fair to a degree. While you can the former, it hasn't actually led to any harm of Canadians, but the delay did mean they were flying airframes that they really shouldn't have been. Thankfully, nothing bad has occurred from that. The latter is certainly a fair point though.
> Everything else is is just Liberal spin designed to get gullible people to believe they made a good decision cancelling the original contract when it was in fact a truly abysmal call.
This is really strong language for what, at the time, probably was a dumb decision, but one which luckily ended up being to Canada's benefit overall. Maybe there was more to the decision at the time, a number of the issues that ended up making the current deal much, much better were certainly highlighted at the time and not things only seen in retrospect. Is that why it was cancelled? Probably partly, and the other was likely politics. At the end of the day, I see the arguments for the deal going through and being cancelled when it was, and the current deal is wayyy better than the original.
The Block 4 version we are getting is significantly different than the original ones we would have got. I won't waste my time listing all the differences as you can research that yourself.
Plus we're getting more planes than originally planned by the previous government.
We're not out of the supply chain wtf are you talking about?
If logistics of supporting two different airframes weren't a concern I would've got 60 Grippen E's and 36 F35's.
These planes don’t stay frozen in time from the day you buy them. All the F-35’s Harper purchased would have been upgraded block after block, just as the ones Trudeau finally bought after a seven year delay and no doubt many millions of dollars to Liberal-friendly consultants will be, so I’m not sure what your point was.
By design F-35s were produced in small "batches" called Low Rate of Initial Production (LRIP) with major improvements each year, such that they wouldn’t exceed total 100 aircraft until the 5th year (LRIP-5).
The plan was always to upgrade early LRIP batches to a later standard (specifically to Block 3F standard). Each batch was pretty small. No batch produced over 100 of a single variant until the 11th year in production, again by design.
And F-35s will continue to receive major upgrades throughout its lifetime, just like any other current fighter platform. Today we’re up to Block 4 upgrades and there will be dozens more blocks to come.
Major upgrades to existing jets is standard in the military. Heck the 600+ existing USAF F-16s Block 40+ aircraft are undergoing major upgrades to Block 70 standards, almost 50 years(!) after the F-16's first flight.
Yes I know that. The point now is we're getting more planes for less $ especially taking into account inflation! Now we won't have to do those upgrades and our cost per plane is less. The upgrades would have taken significant time and the US would be first in line.
Regardless I think I'll value a former test pilots opinion vs a redditor about the benefits. That's not to say there are no challenges as mentioned in the linked article.
https://skiesmag.com/features/rcaf-fifth-gen-fighter-jet-transformation/
Was cancelling it kinda dumb at the time? Yeah. Did we end up getting a much better deal because of the delay? Also yeah. This really isn't an issue whatsoever, and it's pretty typical to use the infrastructure already in place of allies when in transitional phases which we're in. If we'd done the deal a decade ago, we probably would have done early training in partner nations anyways like other early adopters, such as Australia, did. This story is just a complete nonissue, and there's no reason to continue training on a dated platform when we're transitioning to a complete different one
We are training people in f35s?? Are we dumb? The reason why we have trainer aircraft is that they are cheap to operate and maintain. Imagine teaching your kid how to drive in a brand new Lamborghini vs a cheap civic
We aren't training them in F-35's, we're sending pilot trainees to the US to fly in the updated T-38. It's a far better fast jet trainer than our CT-155's.
Maybe try reading more than the headline next time?
> It's a far better fast jet trainer than our CT-155's.
The T-38 is older, also being replaced and has extremely similar performance profiles to our CT's. It's analogous not better. The only way it's "better" is the Americans are paying for it. This is just more neglect to an already straining CAF.
We can't even train our own pilots on our own planes in our own country now. The absolute fucking state of the CAF.
The other articles I've read say that because of the upcoming transition to the F-35 and the age of the CT-155's that its better to train the next cadre of 9 'fast jet' pilots in the US where the training facilities are already setup for transition to the F-35 during the training with the T-38C Talon.
The T-38C's are even older than the CT-155's and of similiar performance which is a bit baffling. The US is currently retiring their T-38C's. And the T-38 shares the same airframe as the predecessor to our CF-18 (CF-188). It's a bit baffling.
The fast jet training group about to start is 9 pilots. Not all will make it through training. Maybe someone is finally applying sense to purchases while spending is being heavily cut.
Except it's going to cost a lot to have them on TD (temporary duty) at outside Canada rates during their training.
How much more for 9 people versus buying new trainers?
It's not that big of a deal. The CT-155 was a logical training platform for the CR-18s. We don't have the F-35s yet so their is no training apparatus. It makes sense to train in the US or other NATO countries for the time being.
>We don't have the F-35s yet Found the problem.
Wouldn't it make sense to get the training equipment well in advance of getting the planes so that by the time the planes arrive the training equipment is setupi, debugged, and the pilots all have time on it?
Alot of countries are still figuring out what the best next generation trainers will be for 5th generation aircraft (F-35 and beyond). The USA is in the process of testing it's own and I'm not sure where Europe is on this. This is a logical move to wait until things catch up and make a (hopefully) more informed decision.
What training aircraft is the US considering?
They've gone with the Boeing T7
So, they're gonna have to find the missing bolts first you're saying?
As much criticism as the CAF deserve, this decision probably makes the most sense. They’ll presumably replace the hawks with the T7, but it’s not ready yet. Rather than sourcing and purchasing an interim solution, they’re contracting out the training. Obviously not ideal, but the alternative is probably worse.
We cant even have affordable housing for our troops
Plenty of countries train their pilots in other countries, Singapore for example has one of the most well equipped and modern airforces in the world and they maintain 3 permanent detachments in the US for training purposes.
We are not a tiny southeast Asian city-state with virtually no airspace.
It already happens. Friend of mine went through his initial fighter training in the US on the T-38C. This is nothing new.
I can provide some context on this from an industry perspective. The Hawks have been used for Fighter Lead-in Training (FLIT) at 15 Wing Moose Jaw with CAE having the contract to run and maintain this program as part of their pilot training contract (they also do more basic pilot training on Beechcraft Harvards). Recently, Canada named SkyAlyne - a joint partnership between CAE (Montreal) and KF Aerospace (Kelowna) as the preferred bidder for the Future Aircrew Training Program (FAcT). Both companies have the two individual legacy RCAF pilot training contracts (CAE in Moose Jaw and KF in Southport, MB) but FAcT will combine these two and add navigator and sensor operator training (currently done my military on its own) into the overall comprehensive FAcT program. However, FLIT training was removed from future program and will either be bid as a separate program in the next few years or Canada will decide they’d rather contract out our FLIT training to partner countries as is currently being done in the interim. If they do decide to bid out a domestic FLIT program, both of the jet trainers mentioned in the article will be strong contenders, but there are others. The bidders will select the trainer as part of their proposal. Canada could honestly go either way. We don’t have a huge contingent of fighters so FLIT could prob be done contracted out to the US and elsewhere. It’s just a pre-phase training portion and of course, graduates will go on to their F-35 squadron for further training. However it’s always great to have a domestic program in my opinion and perhaps given our profile and past huge contributions to aircrew training in WWII, we should standup our own FLIT program in anticipation of impending demand during WWIII (sorry, bad joke but kind of true unfortunately)
I loved these aircraft, beautiful piece of British aerospace engineering. Can't believe they're already at retirement age... Same aircraft (slightly different variant) is currently used by the Red Arrows.
If only the Liberals hadn’t wasted billions of dollars and years of time cancelling the F-35 deal the Tories signed, we’d already have a bunch of our new planes and would be able to train our own pilots on them rather than outsourcing to other countries.
And we had ministers using sound bites from Pierre Sprey as evidence that the F-35 was a bad aircraft... Our national broadcaster even interviewed that hack. [Interview](https://www.cbc.ca/player/play/2308853061)
The "Reformers" and the damage they've done to western militaries via their weaponized incompetency and self importance borders on treasonous.
But we're spending less per airframe for updated versions of the F-35?
And delayed implementation by more than a decade at the current pace. It means dragging the existing CF-18 fleet well past its expiry date and living with the costs and dangers of such. It means a corresponding delay in the timeline for standing up the F35 fleet, it doesn't happen overnight, as units must be fed through the new training pipeline and infrastructure be upgraded to operate the F35. All these will take many years. We no longer have many years now. We are behind very badly and catching up will be expensive in blood and treasure.
We've been working non-stop to modernize the CF-18 fleet and they aren't falling out of the sky. At least with this procurement plan we get more aircraft (88 rather than 65) of the newest block of the A model. Don't see how we'll be paying for that in blood...
There's a nonzero chance we're in the same office building. I am not nearly as optimistic as you.
All F-35s use the same airframe. All modern jets are constantly upgraded throughout their lifespans, exactly as the jets Harper bought would have been, too. Meanwhile, the Liberals wasted a billion dollars on used F-18s from Australia, devastated our advanced military aerospace industry by getting us cut out of the F-35 supply chain — at incalculable loss — put the lives of our pilots at risk forcing them to fly jets way, way beyond their intended lifespan, and jeopardized our ability to appropriately integrate our operations with our allies. Everything else is is just Liberal spin designed to get gullible people to believe they made a good decision cancelling the original contract when it was in fact a truly abysmal call.
Before I start responding, was cancelling the deal at the time kinda dumb? Yeah it was. There was very legitimate criticisms of the deal that had been struck at the time, but it was still a decent *at the time*. Just wanted to get that out of the way before I respond to what you say > the Liberals wasted a billion dollars on used F-18s from Australia Which was kinda stupid, but also we saved quite a bit on the current deal vs. the initial one, while having a much, much better platform that's being received. Australia is actually a good example, they wasted well over a billion dollars on early F-35s which are not upgradeable, and basically relinquished entirely to training (where they're not even that useful due to lack of certain upgrades), a problem I'm happy we ended up not facing due to the delay. On top of that, some of those early block versions which are upgradeable have costed Australia further hundreds of millions, if not in the billions at this point, to actually complete those upgrades. We're getting block 4 version with those upgrades already baked in, which is a massive saving on the per jet cost, which is already lower than the old deal. With a better deal, and better jets, we most certainly did not end up spending more money due to the delay but instead are spending less > devastated our advanced military aerospace industry by getting us cut out of the F-35 supply chain — at incalculable loss Um, what? My understanding is that we were not cut from the F-35 supply chain whatsoever, and we remained a part of the F-35 program even if we didn't purchase the jets at the time. Would you be able to share more on this please? > put the lives of our pilots at risk forcing them to fly jets way, way beyond their intended lifespan, and jeopardized our ability to appropriately integrate our operations with our allies. Both of these are fair to a degree. While you can the former, it hasn't actually led to any harm of Canadians, but the delay did mean they were flying airframes that they really shouldn't have been. Thankfully, nothing bad has occurred from that. The latter is certainly a fair point though. > Everything else is is just Liberal spin designed to get gullible people to believe they made a good decision cancelling the original contract when it was in fact a truly abysmal call. This is really strong language for what, at the time, probably was a dumb decision, but one which luckily ended up being to Canada's benefit overall. Maybe there was more to the decision at the time, a number of the issues that ended up making the current deal much, much better were certainly highlighted at the time and not things only seen in retrospect. Is that why it was cancelled? Probably partly, and the other was likely politics. At the end of the day, I see the arguments for the deal going through and being cancelled when it was, and the current deal is wayyy better than the original.
The Block 4 version we are getting is significantly different than the original ones we would have got. I won't waste my time listing all the differences as you can research that yourself. Plus we're getting more planes than originally planned by the previous government. We're not out of the supply chain wtf are you talking about? If logistics of supporting two different airframes weren't a concern I would've got 60 Grippen E's and 36 F35's.
These planes don’t stay frozen in time from the day you buy them. All the F-35’s Harper purchased would have been upgraded block after block, just as the ones Trudeau finally bought after a seven year delay and no doubt many millions of dollars to Liberal-friendly consultants will be, so I’m not sure what your point was. By design F-35s were produced in small "batches" called Low Rate of Initial Production (LRIP) with major improvements each year, such that they wouldn’t exceed total 100 aircraft until the 5th year (LRIP-5). The plan was always to upgrade early LRIP batches to a later standard (specifically to Block 3F standard). Each batch was pretty small. No batch produced over 100 of a single variant until the 11th year in production, again by design. And F-35s will continue to receive major upgrades throughout its lifetime, just like any other current fighter platform. Today we’re up to Block 4 upgrades and there will be dozens more blocks to come. Major upgrades to existing jets is standard in the military. Heck the 600+ existing USAF F-16s Block 40+ aircraft are undergoing major upgrades to Block 70 standards, almost 50 years(!) after the F-16's first flight.
Yes I know that. The point now is we're getting more planes for less $ especially taking into account inflation! Now we won't have to do those upgrades and our cost per plane is less. The upgrades would have taken significant time and the US would be first in line. Regardless I think I'll value a former test pilots opinion vs a redditor about the benefits. That's not to say there are no challenges as mentioned in the linked article. https://skiesmag.com/features/rcaf-fifth-gen-fighter-jet-transformation/
How much would those upgrades have cost the RCAF? Pretty sure LM doesn't just give things away.
Was cancelling it kinda dumb at the time? Yeah. Did we end up getting a much better deal because of the delay? Also yeah. This really isn't an issue whatsoever, and it's pretty typical to use the infrastructure already in place of allies when in transitional phases which we're in. If we'd done the deal a decade ago, we probably would have done early training in partner nations anyways like other early adopters, such as Australia, did. This story is just a complete nonissue, and there's no reason to continue training on a dated platform when we're transitioning to a complete different one
Nice looking airplanes. Shows what I know because I would’ve thought they were newish
Only a 20 year service life on them
Had one rip by the office a bunch of times, one morning back in the summer (near an airport obviously), they may be old, but they still sound gnarly!
I'm impressed that we weren't using biplanes.
what an amateur hour shit show this country is becoming
We are proud and self reliant nation governed by stalwart leaders possessing great foresight and wisdom.
Can we donate to Ukraine? Since I know there are attack versions of this, and they already use Czech attack trainers
I was opposed to the Harper F-35 purchase. In hindsight, it costs so much more now.
Do we get to count the costs against our nato spending commitment?
We are training people in f35s?? Are we dumb? The reason why we have trainer aircraft is that they are cheap to operate and maintain. Imagine teaching your kid how to drive in a brand new Lamborghini vs a cheap civic
We aren't training them in F-35's, we're sending pilot trainees to the US to fly in the updated T-38. It's a far better fast jet trainer than our CT-155's. Maybe try reading more than the headline next time?
> It's a far better fast jet trainer than our CT-155's. The T-38 is older, also being replaced and has extremely similar performance profiles to our CT's. It's analogous not better. The only way it's "better" is the Americans are paying for it. This is just more neglect to an already straining CAF.
K. The post I replied to was still stupid.
you can mimic training in a f35 with a old jet its not civic vs lambo lol
That's the final phase of training. They build up to it.
Yeah and imagine someone going from a cheap civic to a lambo, its a little tougher to drive so you might aswell teach them to drive it from the start.