By the time you read this, the last Hawk will probably be gone. Seen for more than 20 years in the skies around Moose Jaw and Cold Lake, this is no native red-tailed bird felled by climate change or loss of habitat. Instead, the CT-155 Hawk was a high-performance jet training aircraft; a gateway to a career as a fighter pilot that provided over 1300 young airmen and women with their first critical exposure to fast air operations. Previously identified for retirement in the expectation that the fleet would be out of flying time by 2024, the Hawk has been removed from service. The parade is over, and the colors of 419 Tactical Fighter Training Squadron have been encased and stored away. In practical terms, this means that Canada no longer has a sovereign fighter pilot training capability. Instead, for at least the next seven years the Royal Canadian Air Force (RCAF) plans to send its fighter pilots to schools in the United States and Italy. In theory, nothing much will outwardly change.Of course, in the intervening years between the original decision to remove the Hawk from service and now, many things did change. For instance, two years of pandemic and significant reductions in flight training meant that that the flying rate of the Hawk fleet fell dramatically. Unlike previous aircraft retirements, Canada isn’t shedding 17 tired, obsolete rattletraps. Of the current fleet, only five aircraft are beyond their useful life and ready for mothballs. The remaining 12 collectively have thousands of hours of flying time still in them. In fact, Canada’s Hawks are decades newer than the 1960’s vintage T-38 aircraft our pilots will now train on in the United States.
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