This issue Peter Stark flies a military classic
This issue we move away from general aviation and airliners and take a closer look at one of the more successful advanced military training aircraft - the BAE Systems Hawk.
Some background
The Hawk is a British-designed military single-engined advanced jet training aircraft that first flew in 1974 and as a true classic aircraft, its derivatives still fly today in 13 countries. What has made it such a long-lived military trainer? In addition to it being relatively inexpensive to buy, it was cheap to run, very durable and yet still achieved outstanding performance, so much so that many operators also configured the Hawk to fly combat missions with a variety of weapons systems enabling air-to-air and air-to-ground roles. So successful has the Hawk been that it is still produced today in both the UK and under licence in India.