Share this story A hypersonic missile usually costs about as much as a small mansion — tens of millions of dollars per shot, hand-built, hoarded like crown jewels. The U.S. Navy just placed an order for a hypersonic missile it hopes to buy for the price of a modest...
Share this story It costs north of a hundred million dollars, it is the most sophisticated fighter the United States builds, and on the morning of 9 June it was sitting on a two-lane road in the Finnish woods, taking on fuel with pine trees a wingspan away.Two U.S....
Share this story It is just after two in the morning over the mid-Atlantic, and the cockpit of an Airbus A330 has gone quiet in the worst possible way. No engine hum. No thrust. Just the thin whistle of air over an airframe weighing more than 180 tonnes, sinking...
Share this story On a September morning in 1962, the air traffic controllers at Van Nuys Airport made a phone call. They told the local police and fire departments to stand by. Out on the ramp sat the most absurd aeroplane anyone there had ever seen — a Boeing...
Share this story At 11,000 feet over the wooded hills north of New York City, on a grey December afternoon, two airliners that were never supposed to meet found themselves on a converging path. Within seconds the tip of a Boeing 707’s left wing sliced through...
Share this story It was Christmas Eve, 1971, and the cabin smelled of pine and damp wool. Somewhere among the wrapped presents and the holiday cakes balanced on laps, a seventeen-year-old girl in a sleeveless mini-dress sat beside her mother, watching a wall of black...
Share this story On a freezing afternoon in May 1942, on a frozen lake near the Ural town of Bilimbay, a stubby green aeroplane the size of a fighter trainer crouched on the snow. It carried no propeller. In its tail sat a steel chamber fed by red fuming nitric acid...
Share this story The sky over Dayton was the washed-out blue of a late October afternoon when Lieutenant Harold R. Harris felt his control stick begin to hammer in his hand. He was a mile and a half above the rooftops, throwing his stubby Loening monoplane through a...
Share this story On the morning of 17 March 1947, two test pilots lifted a four-engined jet off the hard-packed lakebed at Muroc, in the California high desert, and into a clear blue sky. The aircraft was ungainly, slab-sided, and unmistakably a product of the piston...
Share this story The blizzard came in off the Sea of Japan in sheets, and the flight deck of the USS Oriskany pitched in the grey November swell. It was 18 November 1952, and Lieutenant Royce Williams climbed into the cockpit of his Grumman F9F-5 Panther for his...
Share this story Just after midnight on 18 June 2026, residents of Moscow filmed something the Russian capital was not built to see: black smoke boiling over the Kapotnya district, where the Moscow Oil Refinery sits. It was the second strike on that single plant in a...
Share this story The Alpha Scramble order reaches the quick reaction alert shelter at Šiauliai before the coffee has cooled. Two Romanian F-16s, fuelled and armed, are airborne over the grey Baltic within minutes, vectored toward an unidentified contact...
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