Grooming QEAF Typhoon Pilots

A joint RAF/Qatari Hawk training squadron will stand up at RAF Leeming in North Yorkshire in September. MS&T Europe Editor Dim Jones describes the known arrangement between the UK and the Gulf nation.

In December 2017, Qatar announced the intention to purchase 24 Eurofighter Typhoon and nine Hawk aircraft, plus a bespoke maintenance support and training package, in a deal worth £6bn. The Typhoons, alongside a similar number of Dassault Rafale ordered from France, would replace the Qatari Emiri Air Force (QEAF)’s fleet of Mirage 200-5s, and the Hawks complement their PAC Super Mushshak and Pilatus PC-21 trainers.

Last year, Qatar’s Defence Minister, His Excellency Dr. Khalid bin Mohamed Al Attiyah, and his UK counterpart, Ben Wallace, signed an agreement to implement a joint UK/Qatar training programme, comprising initially a joint Typhoon squadron, and subsequently a joint Hawk advanced training squadron.

The third element of the agreement involves Voyager aircraft of the RAF’s 101 Squadron periodically deploying to Qatar to conduct air-to-air refuelling (AAR) training with the QEAF.

No 12 Squadron, equipped with Typhoon FGR4 and T3 aircraft, commenced joint operations in June 2020 at RAF Coningsby. The unit is operational, rather than training, and its pilots have all undertaken the Typhoon Operational Conversion on No 29(F) Squadron prior to joining.

The QEAF pilots are a mix of experienced aviators, previously qualified on different types, and ab initio pilots who have completed training with the RAF, comprising Officer Training at the Royal Air Force College Cranwell, followed by Elementary, Basic Fast-Jet and Advanced Flying training at Cranwell and RAF Valley.

In December 2020, aircraft from 12 Squadron, refuelled by Voyagers of 101 Squadron, deployed to Qatar for Exercise Epic Skies, where the Typhoons, supported by 130+ RAF personnel, conducted a range of air-to-air and air-to-ground exercises. The current intention is that 12 Squadron will operate in a joint role until 2023, when it is envisioned that the QEAF will have achieved a self-sustaining cadre of Typhoon aircrew and groundcrew, and will set up their own training unit in Qatar; 12 Squadron will then revert to being an RAF-only squadron.

MoD, BAE, NOVA, L3Harris/CAE

The joint project is overseen in the UK by a programme office in MoD Main Building, comprising RAF personnel, civil servants, and contract staff from BAE Systems and Nova Systems – who have embedded experienced aviation programme management and engineering expertise in both the Typhoon and Hawk programme offices – and in Qatar by a national organisation.

In early April, Dr. Al Attiyah and Mr. Wallace announced that the joint Hawk training squadron, equipped with Qatari Hawk Mk 167 aircraft, would stand up at RAF Leeming in North Yorkshire in September. This announcement is good news for Leeming which, since the disbandment of the last of its Tornado F3 Squadrons in 2008, has had no resident front-line flying units, and is home only to No 100 Squadron, flying the venerable Hawk T1 and the Grob Tutors of Northumbrian University Air Squadron and No 11 Air Experience Flight. In a sustained climate of ‘estate rationalisation’, this might not have been sufficient to warrant the maintenance of a runway and air traffic control services, and Leeming’s ‘bacon’ may only have been saved by the consideration that, with the closure of RAF Leuchars, there would be no military airfield equipped with arrester gear and appropriate fire and rescue services between Lossiemouth in northern Scotland and Coningsby in Lincolnshire.

The new squadron will bring with it the refurbishment of existing facilities and the building of new ones and is to be welcomed. It will have a ‘numberplate’, but that has yet to be announced; there will be no shortage of contenders among famous squadrons with distinguished operational records, now sadly disbanded.

The Hawk 167 is broadly similar to the RAF’s T2, and to those operated by other air forces flying variants of the Hawk Advanced Jet Trainer (AJT), such as the Royal Australian Air Force, the Royal Saudi Air Force, and the Royal Air Force of Oman.

Initially, the aircraft, maintenance and support personnel will be provided by industry, led by the programme’s prime contractor, BAE Systems, as will the flying instructors, who are currently being recruited. The students will all be QEAF, and they will all be destined for the Typhoon. From September 2022, it is planned that the squadron will be manned by RAF instructors, with contract support provided by BAE Systems, and the students will be a mix of QEAF and RAF. In the interim, any training capacity surplus to the QEAF’s needs will be made available to the RAF, which will ease the pressure on the RAF’s own training system at Valley. Indeed, such has this pressure been – with consequent impact on the training pipeline – that 100 Squadron, in addition to its adversary air and JTAC training roles, has recently been training RAF fast-jet students on the Hawk T1.

The difficulties at Valley have been concerned not only with aircraft availability, but also with the provision of suitably qualified instructors in what is an instructor-intensive syllabus; it will be interesting to see where the additional bodies for the Leeming squadron will come from. Historically, the problem has in part been solved by the availability of surplus pilots, consequent on the seemingly inexorable contraction of the front line. However, the MoD Integrated Review Command Paper, published on 23 March as an adjunct to the overarching ‘Global Britain in a Competitive Age, the Integrated Review of Security, Defence, Development and Foreign Policy’, commits to ‘fully establish[ing] all seven operational Typhoon Squadrons and grow[ing] the Lightning II Force, increasing the fleet size beyond the 48 aircraft that we have already ordered’. The Typhoon force currently comprises seven operational squadrons and a reserve OCU squadron; however, one of the seven – for the time being at least – is the joint RAF/QEAF squadron, and another is equipped with Tranche 1 aircraft, and performs Quick Reaction Alert (QRA) and adversary air roles, the latter alongside the Hawk T1s of 100 Squadron. This situation, therefore, sits somewhat uneasily with the paper’s plan to ‘retir[e] Typhoon Tranche 1 by 2025, and Hawk T1 [by an unspecified date]’, not to mention the future of the T1-equipped Red Arrows. There are, as far as I am aware, no plans to purchase additional Typhoon or Hawk T2.

The reactivation in 2018 of a second Hawk T2 unit (No XXV(F) Squadron) within No 4 Flying Training School, with no increase to the fleet size (28 aircraft), was almost certainly aimed at separating conversion to type training (from turboprop to jet) and advanced weapons and tactics training, thus obviating the need for all instructors to be multi-qualified. We have, to my knowledge, been around this buoy at least twice before. The Leeming joint squadron will, presumably, be required to embrace the whole syllabus. The new set-up will include a suite of synthetic aircrew training devices, comprising state-of-the-art full-mission simulators (FMS), desk-top trainers and avionics training equipment. These will be provided by L3Harris (whose Military Training business was recently acquired by CAE), and managed and staffed by BAE Systems; the FMS is expected to be in service as the first aircraft arrives. The facilities required to host the devices will be provided and owned by the UK MoD.

There are no published longer-term plans for the Qatari Hawk force. When the QEAF has built up a cadre of suitably qualified instructors, the Hawks may transfer to Qatar, but the significant infrastructure investment at Leeming will need to be amortised first.