Question to the Ministry of Defence:

To ask the Secretary of State for Defence, with reference to page 120 of his Department’s Annual Report and Accounts 2022-23, HC1468, published in July 2023, for what reason the Hawk Collision Warning System was cancelled.

As the Annual Report sets out, the decision to cancel Collision Warning System on Hawk was made departmentally as part of the Integrated Review.

There was no Off The Shelf commercial system available which can fit in the existing Hawk T1 cockpit. The majority of the costs incurred were in analysis and trials of bespoke cockpit configuration changes to enable integration. This analysis showed that proposed configurations remained immature, were sub-optimal against key user requirements and disproportionately costly. Air Safety remains our paramount concern. We are now pursuing the introduction of additional Hawk T1 aircraft transponder conspicuity measures.