Is Winter coming early in the Northern Hemisphere? In September 2022, Talons from Atlantic Southeast Florida decided to migrate to Pacific Northwest Idaho.

The U.S. Air Force’s (USAF) 2d Fighter Training Squadron is based on Tyndall Air Force Base (AFB), in Florida.  From the 12th through to the 23rd, of September, the 3rd Generation T-38 Talons flew around Idaho, helping the USAF teach its youngest bird, the 5th Generation F-35A Lightning-2 (which had also flown north from Luke AFB, Arizona), how to fly.

According to Captain Ryan ‘Joker’ McCooey, of the 61st Fighter Squadron’s B-Flight, the training over Mountain Home AFB is the final schooling of a long F-35 program taught mainly on Luke AFB: “At the end of their six-to-eight month basic course, students put together all the building blocks we have taught them throughout the course into these Capstone rides where they do both air-to-air and air-to-ground [tactics] during the same sortie. They get to practice all the things we taught them in a large force exercise, integrating with different assets that we don’t always have the ability to do at Luke.”

Final F-35 training is usually done over Mountain Home AFB, against the F-15E Strike Eagle, but I believe this is the first time the T-38 Talon was involved.

While over Idaho, the Florida Talons play the ‘bad guy’ (Red Air) against the Arizona Lightning-2s.  Playing the bad guy has been the forte of the T-38 trainer for decades, all the way back to the days of the non-declared, non-official, Cold War.

While launching from Mountain Home AFB, Idaho, the T-38 Talons helped qualify six F-35A pilots, and help upgrade the qualifications of four other pilots to instructor status.

The concept of aircraft generations was started by U.S. air historian Richard P. Hallion, back in the 1990s, but it wasn’t until Russia adopted the concept that it became standard in the United States (apparently it was Russia who first referred to the USAF F-22 Raptor as a 5th Generation fighter).

In April 2019, the Northrop T-38 Talon celebrated 60 years of service!

MORE T-38 HERITAGE PAINT JOBS

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