T-38 to gain new wings for next century

June 17th, 1999

The venerable T-38 Talon supersonic trainer, already 40 years old, will be training the grandchildren of today's student pilots. The Northrop Grumman Corporation announced at the Paris Air Show that their Integrated Systems and Aerostructures (ISA) Sector has been awarded a $1.8 million contract by the US Air Force to continue designing an improved wing for the aircraft so that the US Air Force can train pilots in it for the next four decades.

Engineers are working to double the structural life of today's T-38 wings. The new wing is expected to go into production in 2005.

The T-38 Wing Life Improvement Programme began in 1997 with recommendations and detailed analysis of design improvements for certain areas on the wing. The newly awarded Phase III contract will encompass durability and damage tolerance analysis, as well as testing on improvements.

More than 500 T-38's are currently operational with the Air Force and NASA, along with more than 100 internationally.

Testing will be at the 'coupon' level, which allows evaluation of the proposed replacement materials (aluminium alloys with several years of service history in other aircraft) when exposed to the T-38's predicted operational spectrum.

"Coupons are small material specimens machined to represent areas on the aircraft where we know fatigue occurs," said Jim Helbling, F-5/T-38 engineering team leader. "We collect data from in-service T-38's to tell us where the airframe experiences cyclic stresses and use that to create a simulated environment to evaluate the new materials. Data from the simulations will let us predict when cracks will begin to occur and help us understand the design changes necessary to increase the wing's structural life."

The T-38 first flew in April 1959 at Edwards Air Force Base in California, and the most recent T-38 wing major redesign occurred in the late 1970s.

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