T-6 Texan II
ICAO TEX2Usually the single most numerous military aircraft in the air anywhere. Live positions for every T-6 Texan II transmitting now.
Flying right now
Live · 30s- SMALL61 17,475 ft 01-3617 🇺🇸 United States
- HOOK31 16,525 ft 03-3690 🇺🇸 United States
- RFNK772 16,100 ft 166189 🇺🇸 United States
- KATT20 15,950 ft 165980 🇺🇸 United States
- TAUNT11 12,500 ft 01-3619 🇺🇸 United States
- MAKO6 12,400 ft 166231 🇺🇸 United States
- HOWLR81 12,150 ft 05-3797 🇺🇸 United States
- DEVIL43 12,100 ft 02-3647 🇺🇸 United States
- TEX06 12,100 ft NZ1406 🇳🇿 New Zealand
- TAUNT12 10,925 ft 03-3694 🇺🇸 United States
- SMASH31 10,425 ft 00-3585 🇺🇸 United States
- TEX02 10,125 ft NZ1402 🇳🇿 New Zealand
Airframe
- Manufacturer
- Beechcraft
- Role
- Primary flight training
- Class
- L1T — Landplane, 1 turboprop engine
- Crew
- 2 — instructor and student
- First flight
- 15 July 1998
- In service
- 2001
Operators airborne
About the T-6 Texan II
If you open the globe on a weekday afternoon and wonder why one type dominates the count, this is it. The T-6 is where almost every American military pilot starts, and a training base flies the same handful of airframes over and over: a sortie lasts about an hour, so one aircraft can appear four or five times in a day.
That gives the type a distinctive rhythm on the feed. Numbers climb through the morning at Sheppard, Vance, Columbus, Whiting Field and Randolph, collapse at weekends, and drop away almost entirely on American public holidays. It is the closest thing military tracking has to an office-hours signal.
The aircraft itself is a heavily reworked Pilatus PC-9 built under licence in Wichita. Britain flies it as the Texan T1, Canada as the CT-156 Harvard II, and it has been exported to Greece, Israel, Mexico, Morocco, New Zealand and others.
Callsign prefixes
- RANGER
- Sheppard Air Force Base training flights
- TEXAN
- Widely used across US Air Force training wings
- SHOOTER
- A recurring US Navy primary training block
How to recognise it
- —A single turboprop with a four-bladed propeller and a long tandem canopy stepped up towards the back.
- —Very small — about eleven metres from nose to tail — with a low straight wing.
- —On the feed: circuits and local sorties at 150 to 250 knots, rarely above 20,000 feet, almost always returning to where they started.
Common questions
+ Why are there always so many T-6s flying?
Because it is the aircraft nearly every American military pilot learns on, and training sorties are short. A single T-6 can generate four or five separate flights in a day, and several training wings operate dozens of them at once.
+ Is the T-6 Texan II related to the Second World War Texan?
Only by name. The original T-6 Texan was a 1930s North American design. This aircraft is a 1990s Beechcraft development of the Swiss Pilatus PC-9, and the name was revived deliberately for the lineage.
+ What is the difference between the T-6A and T-6B?
Mostly the cockpit. The T-6B has a glass display suite and a head-up display; the T-6A has conventional instruments. The T-6C is the export version. All three report as TEX2 on ADS-B.