Red Arrows Hawk T1 fleet running low on fatigue life

Fourteen of the twenty-four Hawk T1 jets still on the books of the Royal Air Force have used up more than eighty per cent of their fatigue index, the Ministry of Defence has said.

The figures came in a series of written questions submitted by the Conservative MP for Huntingdon, Ben Obese-Jecty, who has been pressing the Ministry of Defence in recent weeks for an updated picture of where the Hawk T1 fleet now stands.

In a written answer issued on Monday, the Minister of State for the Armed Forces, Luke Pollard, confirmed the fourteen-aircraft figure as of the first of June, having confirmed in a separate response last Friday that the fleet had been reduced to twenty-four Hawks at that date.

An earlier reply to the same MP, given on the third of June, said that two Hawk T1 airframes had been retired and struck from the Military Aircraft Register since January of last year, when the previous public figure was given. The fatigue index is the standard measure the RAF uses to track how much of the structural life of each individual airframe has been spent in flight, a particular concern for the Hawk T1, which entered Royal Air Force service in the late 1970s and which has long since been retired from the front-line training role.

With the front-line training task handed over, the Red Arrows are now effectively the sole operational user of the Hawk T1 in British service, putting the display team at the heart of any discussion about the type’s remaining life. In a separate written answer in April, Pollard told MPs that across all Hawk T1 airframes the RAF had retained “sufficient overall remaining available fatigue life” to keep the Red Arrows flying through to 2030 as planned, language that the new figures do not contradict but which leaves limited room to spare on individual aircraft.

With the new Strategic Defence Review still being worked into the Defence Investment Plan promised by the Prime Minister within weeks, the question of what flies over the King’s Birthday Parade in red after the Hawk T1 is one that is unlikely to wait much longer.