The Gnat was a complex little beast, with a pitch system invented by the devil. Very short on range and very twitchy to fly in formation, although it had a sensational roll rate. It had classic swept wings handling, an excellent compass system and it flew like a knife through butter at low level. It also had the
superb offset TACAN system. But we spent most our time practising emergency procedures and very little on applied flying.
The Hunter T7 was huge in comparison. Much easier to fly than the Gnat, but with a cockpit from the stone age. Once you'd mastered strapping in to the ancient bang seat, the Hunter F6 was even easier to fly, particularly in formation and had a nice big engine! The gyro gunsight was masterpiece of design, but the GGSR camera with those wretched cine mags was certainly not. Not much in the way of navigation systems in the TWU jets; most had Rebecca DME and UHF only radio. The Mk 9 had ADF (not that anyone ever used it except for listening to radio stations) and only a few had TACAN. But we rarely flew anything except day low level visual navigation, so who cared about navaids? The only real flaw was the fuel gauging system; also the fuel transfer could occasionally play up. But everyone forgave it that - the single seat Hunter was probably every pilot's favourite during training in those days.
I flew the Hawk in 1980 when it was relatively new. It had an abysmal compass system (later replaced with AHARS), the lateral stability was inadequate (later improved with a fin extension), so that it was less stable than the Hunter when weaponeering. The engine response was dull compared with the Gnat or Hunter (the Reds use a modified engine control system), but it was really, really easy to fly and had excellent range. We didn't need to do as much in-flight emergency training and gone were the horrors of manual reversion. But for some stupid reason it didn't have offset TACAN and I never understood why that was. The gunsight wasn't as good as that fitted to the Hunter, but at least it had a much better cine system! Roll rate wasn't a patch on the Gnat, but it had higher 'g' limits - until They realised that we were gobbling up fatigue. I understand that the CFS Hawk course included a +8 g demo, but that was probably binned after a few years?
The Hawk is undoubtedly a better trainer than either the Gnat or Hunter. But somehow it rather lacks the soul of its classic forebears...
