Meet the Northrop T-38 Talon, a Trainer Jet with Combat Performance!

Video from the channel Tech Defense about Northrop, linked on its Above Ten Thousand entry. Duration: 5:13. Language: English. Video type: Documentary.

An explainer piece about the Northrop T-38 Talon, a supersonic advanced trainer. Its main operator remains the US Air Force.

The T-38 originated in the 1950s as a Northrop in-house initiative. It derived from the company's lightweight fighter line and did not answer any formal Air Force specification; at the time, the service trained its pilots on the subsonic Lockheed T-33 Shooting Star. It first flew in March 1959 and entered service in March 1961. It was the world's first supersonic trainer. It belongs to the same family as the F-5 and the F-20 Tigershark, sharing their overall look.

It has small, low-mounted swept wings, two side-by-side engines and a single tail fin. It uses tricycle landing gear with a steerable nose wheel and two independent hydraulic systems for the controls. In the tandem cockpit, the student sits up front and the instructor behind. Nearly the entire fleet has been upgraded to the T-38C standard with new avionics. NASA uses it as a trainer and chase plane, while the Air Force uses it in support of B-2 operations and as an adversary aircraft. It also has limits: it cannot be refueled in flight or fly at high angles of attack, and it is no longer adequate to train pilots for fifth-generation fighters such as the F-22 and F-35. That is why the video considers the Air Force's advanced pilot training program necessary.