The T-28 was designed for one job: to take a raw student and turn them into a military pilot safely. Tricycle gear made it easy to land, the big radial gave honest, predictable power, and the tandem cockpit let an instructor watch every input. For that role it was excellent, and the U.S. Navy kept it in primary and basic training into the 1980s.

Its second life came from economics and politics. In the counter-insurgency campaigns of the late 1950s and 1960s, air forces needed something cheaper, slower and more rugged than a jet — an aircraft that could loiter over a jungle, carry a useful load of bombs and rockets, operate from rough strips, and be flown by pilots of modest experience. The surplus T-28 fitted perfectly. France’s Fennec conversion proved the concept in Algeria; the American T-28D Nomad industrialised it for Southeast Asia. The same qualities that made the Trojan a good trainer — docility, ruggedness, simplicity — made it a natural light-attack aircraft. Its limits, exposed in combat, were structural: airframes built for training were not built for the sustained stress of diving weapons delivery, and wing failures dogged the type in hard use.

The armed conversions were separate national programmes with the same idea. France acted first: from 1959 the state converted surplus T-28A airframes into the Sud Aviation Fennec (“desert fox”), fitting the R-1820 engine, underwing armament and, on many, machine-gun pods, for counter-insurgency in Algeria. Roughly 245 are commonly cited as converted. The United States industrialised the concept as the T-28D Nomad from the early 1960s, strengthening the airframe and adding six hardpoints. Both aircraft did the same job — slow, patient, low-altitude strike work against irregular forces — that fast jets did poorly.

The Trojan was engineered as a trainer, not a dive bomber, and combat use found the difference. Flown hard in repeated weapons-delivery dives — a flight profile it was never stressed for — T-28Ds in South Vietnamese service suffered wing separations that killed crews and badly hurt confidence in the aircraft. The problem drove reinforcement programmes and, ultimately, the type’s replacement in front-line VNAF service by the sturdier Douglas A-1 Skyraider and, later, jets such as the A-37. It is the clearest illustration of the T-28’s core tension: a training airframe asked to do a combat airframe’s job.

As a military trainer the T-28 was deliberately cheap to buy and run — that was the point of a trainer — and no standardised period cost-per-flight-hour figure survives in the open record. A commonly repeated period unit cost of around $130,000 for a 1950s T-28A should be read as an order-of-magnitude estimate, not a sourced price.

As a modern warbird the Trojan is considered one of the more affordable big radials to own. Owner and broker estimates for direct operating cost — fuel, oil and routine maintenance — commonly fall in the region of $400–800 per flight hour, with the thirsty Wright R-1820 and engine-overhaul reserves the main drivers. Treat any single figure with caution: real costs swing widely with fuel prices, how hard the engine is worked, and whether a major overhaul is looming.