Talon trainer reaches half-century milestone - Air Force News | News from Afghanistan & Iraq - Air Force Times

Talon trainer reaches half-century milestone

The T-38 Talon has reached the big 5-0.

April 10 marked the 50th anniversary of the T-38’s first flight. To mark the milestone, the plane’s builder, Northrop Grumman, held a celebration at its plant in El Segundo, Calif.

“The T-38 has been the backbone for training Air Force aviators of the past and the present, and undoubtedly it will continue to produce the best pilots in the world for many years to come,” Maj. Gen. Greg Feest, commander of the 19th Air Force, said at the celebration.

The commemoration came as the Air Force takes its first steps toward finding a replacement aircraft for the T-38, which is still expected to fly through 2020.

The Talon’s history began in 1956, when the former Northrop Corp. won the Air Force contract to develop an advanced supersonic trainer, a Northrop historian said.

The first test flight of the developmental YT-38 was April 10, 1959.

Northrop went on to build 1,187 T-38s between 1959 and 1972, the year the program ended. Approximately half of those aircraft still fly with the Air Force, Navy, NASA and air forces around the world.

Northrop calculates approximately 75,000 pilots have been trained in the T-38. The planes have logged 13 million flight hours, with the high-time aircraft flying 19,000 hours. One NASA pilot flew 9,200 hours in T-38s.