By Robbin Laird
When the first T-7A Red Hawk trainer arrives at Joint Base San Antonio-Randolph this December, it will mark more than just the introduction of a new aircraft. It represents the U.S. Air Force’s acknowledgment of a decades-long training crisis that has quietly undermined pilot development: the service has been teaching aviators habits they’ll later need to unlearn, building muscle memory for aircraft that retired before many current pilots were born, and fundamentally misaligning the earliest stages of flight training with the demands of modern air combat.
The numbers tell part of the story. The T-38 Talon, which the T-7 will replace, is roughly sixty years old. It was designed to prepare pilots for Vietnam-era jets like the F-100 Super Sabre, F-105 Thunderchief, and F-4 Phantom, aircraft that retired more than three decades ago.
But the deeper problem isn’t age.
It’s that every hour a student pilot spends in a T-38 is an hour spent learning responses, developing instincts, and ingraining motor patterns that may actively work against them when they transition to fifth-generation fighters.
Maj. Gen. Clark Quinn, deputy commander of Air Education and Training Command, underscored a striking detail in a recent interview: during his time as a T-38 instructor pilot, he spent approximately a quarter of the entire training syllabus just teaching students how to land the jet without crashing. A quarter. Not teaching advanced tactics, not building situational awareness, not learning weapons employment, simply preventing the aircraft from stalling and killing them during approach.
This isn’t a trivial detail.
It represents hundreds of hours across thousands of pilots, all developing deeply ingrained compensatory behaviors for an aircraft design problem that doesn’t exist in modern fighters. The T-38 lacks leading edge flaps, making it prone to stalling during landing. As Maj. Gen. Gregory Kreuder, commander of 19th Air Force, noted: “You’ve got to know what to do quickly, or you can be in big trouble.”
But here’s the problem that the Air Force hasn’t fully articulated: motor learning research shows that deeply practiced physical skills create neural pathways that are extraordinarily resistant to change.
When a pilot spends months learning specific control inputs, developing particular scan patterns, and building automatic responses to certain flight characteristics, those patterns don’t simply disappear when they transition to a different aircraft. They persist, creating what learning theorists call “negative transfer” or where prior learning actively interferes with new skill acquisition.
Every T-38 graduate who moves to an F-35 doesn’t arrive as a blank slate ready to learn fifth-generation flying. They arrive with hundreds of hours of ingrained responses built for an aircraft that behaves fundamentally differently. They’ve learned to anticipate stalls that won’t happen, to compensate for control characteristics that don’t exist, and to employ tactics that operational commanders abandoned years ago.
The implications extend far beyond individual pilot development. Consider the formation takeoffs and landings that were once central to the T-38 syllabus. These skills were essential when the Air Force routinely sent large formations of fighters into battle together, a tactical approach that reflected Cold War-era air combat doctrine. But as Quinn acknowledged, “operational commanders don’t use those tactics anymore.”
So why were student pilots still learning them?
The answer reveals a troubling inertia in training systems: because the aircraft could do them, because the syllabus had always included them, because changing curriculum is hard. Meanwhile, every hour spent practicing obsolete formation procedures was an hour not spent on skills that modern combat actually demands.
The Air Force has now dropped formation takeoffs and landings from the syllabus, but this raises an urgent question: what else remains in pilot training simply because it’s always been there?
How many other skills are being taught not because they’re relevant to modern air combat, but because they’re necessary to safely operate a sixty-year-old trainer?
Kreuder offered a fascinating observation about the evolution of fighter aircraft: “Over time, I have seen our aircraft get easier to fly and harder to employ. The F-35 is the easiest aircraft to fly that I have ever flown. We want pilots focused on employing the mission weapon systems and not focused on whether or not they’re going to stall and fall out of the sky.”
This represents a fundamental shift in what it means to be a fighter pilot.
The romantic image of aviation, the skilled aviator wrestling a difficult machine through challenging flight regimes, is giving way to something closer to a systems operator managing complex sensor fusion, weapons employment, and kill web warfare while the aircraft handles much of the actual flying.
But if that’s the future, then training pilots on an aircraft that demands constant attention to basic flight characteristics isn’t just inefficient: it’s teaching the wrong mental model entirely.
The cognitive load required to safely fly a T-38 leaves less bandwidth for learning the systems management and tactical decision-making that define modern air combat. Students are learning to focus on stick-and-rudder skills at exactly the moment when the Air Force needs them focused elsewhere.
The current training pipeline forces an awkward transition: pilots spend their formative training hours learning to manage a demanding, quirky aircraft, then must essentially relearn their job when they encounter fighters that fly more smoothly but require vastly more sophisticated tactical employment. It’s building foundational skills for one type of flying, then asking pilots to operate in a completely different paradigm.
Here’s a question the Air Force hasn’t adequately addressed: what about the pilots currently in training or entering the pipeline in the next two years?
The first non-test T-7 arrives in December 2025, but student pilots won’t begin training on it until early 2028. That means at least two more years of aviators learning on the T-38, building the same outdated habits, developing the same misaligned instincts, and requiring the same remediation when they reach operational units.
The service is essentially acknowledging that its current training system is fundamentally flawed while simultaneously continuing to run pilots through it. Every pilot who graduates between now and 2028 will face the full burden of learning on an aircraft that teaches the wrong lessons. They’ll be the last generation of aviators to carry this particular developmental handicap into their operational careers.
The Air Force could argue that there’s no alternative but this gap period deserves more attention and mitigation than it’s receiving. Are there simulator-based programs that could help offset some of the negative transfer?
Are there specific debriefing or remediation protocols that could help pilots recognize and overcome T-38-specific habits more quickly?
The fact that the Air Force needs a completely new aircraft that incremental improvements to the T-38 couldn’t bridge the gap shows how far the training system had drifted from operational reality. This isn’t a minor upgrade. It’s a fundamental reimagining of what primary flight training should accomplish.
There’s also the question of collaborative combat aircraft, the semi-autonomous drone wingmen that will fly alongside manned fighters. Should pilots learn to employ CCAs during training, or wait until they reach operational units?
The Air Force hasn’t decided, but the question reveals a broader uncertainty: as warfare becomes more kill web focused and autonomous systems more prevalent, what core skills do human pilots actually need to develop?
But if the goal is operators who can manage complex systems, make rapid tactical decisions, and employ sophisticated weapons in a kill web approach, then every hour spent wrestling with unnecessary flight control challenges is wasted.
Kreuder’s comment that pilots should focus on “employing the mission weapon systems, and not focus on whether or not they’re going to stall and fall out of the sky” sounds obviously correct.
But it also marks the end of an era where stick-and-rudder skills defined pilot excellence. The future fighter pilot is more tactician than aviator, more systems operator than aircraft commander. That’s not necessarily wrong, but it is different..
But the deeper question remains: what are we still teaching, across all domains of military training, simply because we’ve always taught it?
What other mismatches are quietly accumulating while institutions move slowly toward solutions?
The cost of outdated training systems isn’t always obvious, but it shows up in pilots who have to unlearn before they can truly learn, in wasted hours building the wrong skills, in the invisible gap between what training develops and what operations demand.