The Hawk first flew in 1974 and entered RAF service as a fast-jet trainer and light attack aircraft; it is the aircraft the Red Arrows display team flies to this day. When the U.S. Navy’s VTXTS trainer competition picked the Hawk in 1981, it launched one of the more unusual transatlantic defence programmes of the era: a British design, navalised and largely built in the United States by McDonnell Douglas, with British Aerospace as partner and Rolls-Royce providing the engine.

The result kept the Hawk’s clean lines but changed enough underneath that the T-45 is best understood as a carrier-specific cousin rather than a straight copy. Where the RAF Hawk was optimised for economical land-based flying, the Goshawk was rebuilt for the single most demanding routine in military aviation — the catapult shot and the arrested landing — repeated by students who have never done it before.

Two changes turn a land trainer into a carrier aircraft: the hook and the nose gear. The Goshawk’s arrestor hook drops to snag one of the deck’s arresting wires, decelerating the jet from approach speed to a stop in about two seconds. Its nose gear is a long-stroke, twin-wheel unit strong enough to be attached to a steam catapult and flung down the deck, and to take the jolt of a firm, no-flare carrier landing that would punish a conventional trainer’s undercarriage. The main gear was similarly reinforced with twin wheels. None of this makes the T-45 faster — it makes it survivable at the boat.

The first Goshawks, the T-45A, had a conventional analog cockpit. From the late 1990s the Navy introduced the T-45C, built around a modern digital “glass” cockpit — often referred to as Cockpit 21 — with multi-function displays in place of dials. This let students train on the kind of digital displays they would meet in front-line aircraft such as the F/A-18 Super Hornet, and earlier T-45As were progressively brought up to a comparable standard. The T-45C is the version that carries the fleet’s training today.

As a training aircraft the T-45 was chosen partly because it is comparatively cheap to run, but exact figures are slippery. A rough flyaway unit cost of around $17–18 million is commonly cited, though numbers vary with year, batch and how support is counted. For hourly operating cost, U.S. Navy budget and readiness documents have pointed to figures in the region of a few thousand dollars per flight hour — often quoted around $5,000 — but there is no single authoritative public number, and any precise dollar figure should be treated as an estimate. What is not in doubt is the comparison: an hour in the Goshawk costs a small fraction of an hour in the front-line fighters its graduates go on to fly.