Last September, the Taiwanese aircraft manufacturer AIDC presented its new advanced training aircraft, the T-5 Brave Eagle. Two days ago, the first prototype of the Brave Eagle was making its first flight, perfectly in tune with the development schedule announced last year. If the aircraft behaves as expected, some pre-production aircraft are expected to be produced from November 2021. In 2023, AIDC will start serial production at full speed, and 66 copies will be delivered to the Taiwanese Air Force, or Republic of China Air Force (ROCAF), by 2026.
Derived from the Taiwanese fighter plane F-CK-1 Ching Kuo, itself inspired by the American F-16, the Brave Eagle has a relatively new genesis. Aircraft manufacturers around the world tend to tend upgrade their training aircraft to light combat aircraft rather than performing the reverse process. For Taiwan, however, the Ching Kuo represented a perfectly logical basis for development from an industrial, economic and operational point of view.
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