Tomcats 4, Gaddafi 0: The Gulf of Sidra Shootdowns
Share this story Muammar Gaddafi drew a line across the Mediterranean and dared the United States Navy to cross it. The Navy crossed it twice. Both times, F-14 Tomcats answered. The two Gulf of Sidra incidents — 1981 and 1989 — are the only American air-to-air kills...
The German Jump Jet That Lost to Math
Share this story It is a grey morning at Bremen, late in the summer of 1971. On the concrete apron stands a stubby, hunched little jet, its camouflage still factory-fresh, the marking VAK 191 B painted along the nose. Three engines spool up at once and the noise is...
The Day Japanese Naval Aviation Died
Share this story It is just after ten in the morning on 19 June 1944, and Lieutenant (junior grade) Alexander Vraciu is hanging in the blue over the Philippine Sea, hood back, oxygen mask tight, hunting. Below and ahead of his Grumman F6F Hellcat, a loose gaggle of...
The Duck That Invented the Seaplane
Share this story It is the morning of 28 March 1910, and a thin mist still clings to the Étang de Berre, the great salt lagoon west of Marseille. A 27-year-old engineer named Henri Fabre sits astride a slender wooden beam, perched above three flat floats that bob...
The Bent Wingtips That Save Billions in Fuel
Share this story Sit in a window seat over the wing of almost any modern airliner and you will see it: the wingtip, instead of ending in a clean point, bends sharply upward into a fin. It looks like a small design flourish. It is not. That upturned tip is quietly one...
The Jet With Its Wings on Backwards
Share this story Roll the X-29 onto its back and the wings look wrong. Not damaged, not folded for storage — just backwards. Where every other jet on the ramp sweeps its wings rearward like an arrowhead, the X-29 sweeps them forward, the tips reaching out ahead...
The Aircraft That Had No Wings
Share this story It is the morning of 18 September 1972, on a Dornier test field beside Lake Constance. There is no cockpit to climb into, no pilot to brief. The machine on the apron looks less like an aircraft than a fat steel cigar laid on its side: a smooth...
The Drones Come Home: Russia’s Refineries Burn
Share this story The fire that broke out before dawn on Sunday in a refinery in Russia’s Krasnodar region was, by now, a familiar sight. Columns of black smoke climbed kilometres into low cloud over Slavyansk-na-Kubani, a stone’s throw from annexed Crimea....
The World’s Only Civilian Phantom Flies Again
Share this story It is mid-morning on 8 June 2026 at Ellington Field in Houston, and Harry “D-Day” Daye is strapping into a machine that has not left the ground in seven years. The ramp smells of jet fuel and Texas heat. Behind him sits Jerod Flohr, one of the...
France Turns a Cargo Plane Into a War Brain
Share this story It begins, as these things often do, not with a missile but with a laptop. Somewhere in the cavernous cargo hold of a French A400M Atlas — a hold built to swallow a helicopter or a 37-tonne armoured vehicle — an operator will soon sit at a console,...
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