North American’s approach to the 1956 requirement was cautious and cheap. Rather than design a new wing, it took the unswept wing and undercarriage of the FJ-1 Fury, whose low-speed handling was well understood. The control system came from the T-28C Trojan, the Navy’s carrier-capable piston trainer, so instructors moving from one to the other found familiar responses. The fuselage was new, with a raised rear cockpit that gave the instructor a view over the student’s helmet, a pressurised and air-conditioned cockpit, an arrester hook and permanent wingtip tanks.

The result was not elegant, but it was safe and forgiving. It had to be, because its users were young men with only a few hundred hours, who would be asked to fly it on to a pitching deck. The low-speed manners that made it an excellent carrier trainer also made it the Navy’s chosen aircraft for teaching spin recovery to future tactical aviators. The Buckeye was also one of the last Navy aircraft launched from catapults with a bridle rather than a nose-tow launch bar, a reminder of how far back its design reached.

Two air forces bought new Buckeyes. Venezuela took the T-2D from 1973, with sources giving between 12 and 24 aircraft, and used them for advanced training. Greece received 40 T-2Es from 1976, replacing T-33s, with extra hardpoints that let them double as light-attack aircraft. They went to the 120 Air Training Wing at Kalamata, flown by 362 and 363 Squadrons.

In Greece the Buckeye outlived its American career by more than 15 years. By the 2020s only about two dozen remained, with a handful airworthy at any time, kept going with surplus US Navy spares. Students logged around 80 hours on the type before a further 60 hours of tactical training, and since 2009 some Greek students have finished their training in Italy. The first M-346 trainers arrived on 17 May 2023, under a government-to-government deal with Israel for ten aircraft, and the crash of a T-2E near Kalamata on 27 December 2023 effectively grounded the last Buckeyes for good.

The Buckeye’s tandem cockpit seated the student in front and the instructor behind and above. Both had Martin-Baker ejection seats and a full set of controls under one canopy, and the cockpit was pressurised and air-conditioned, a real comfort in the summer heat of Mississippi, Texas and Florida. Fuel was carried in the fuselage and in fixed wingtip tanks, 691 US gallons in all on the T-2C.

The aircraft had no internal guns, but underwing stations could carry gun pods with .50-calibre machine guns, practice bombs or 2.75-inch rockets, letting it teach weapons delivery as well as flying. Avionics were basic and analogue throughout its life, which kept it cheap to run but left it increasingly remote from the glass cockpits students would meet in the fleet. That gap, more than any fault in the airframe, was what finally drove the move to the T-45.

• YT2J-1: prototype, first flight 31 January 1958.
• T2J-1 / T-2A: single Westinghouse J34 of 3,400 lbf; 217 built.
• T2J-2 / T-2B: two Pratt & Whitney J60 turbojets; 97 built.
• T-2C: two General Electric J85-GE-4 turbojets; 231 built, the main US Navy version.
• T-2D: export version for Venezuela, delivered from 1973.
• T-2E: export version for Greece with additional hardpoints; 40 delivered from 1976.

No official cost per flight hour for the Buckeye has been published in the sources consulted, so any figure is an estimate. The T-2C’s two J85s are close relatives of the engines in the T-38 Talon, and the airframe was deliberately simple, with analogue avionics and parts shared with older aircraft. That suggests an operating cost of a few thousand US dollars an hour in today’s money, perhaps US$3,000 to 5,000. The real cost of the type in its last years was keeping it flying at all: Greece relied on surplus US Navy spares, and only a small fraction of its fleet was airworthy at any one time.