Britain is spending millions of pounds a year to send pilots overseas for training because the RAF does not have enough fast-jet training aircraft available.
Problems with the Hawk T2 jets have resulted in less than half of the fleet being available for training in the UK because they cannot fly for too long without the engines “blowing up”, sources said.
As a result, the Ministry of Defence is having to pay the Americans and the Italians as much as £55 million over the next three years, around £2 million per pilot, so they can train them instead.
This is in addition to the roughly £5.4 million already spent on training each pilot in the UK, even though a large chunk of the training cannot
