Ten GlobalEyes, Five Tritons, One Shared Airlift
When we wrote last week that NATO’s next radar jet would be Swedish, the news still wore the modest clothing of a Reuters exclusive. On Tuesday in Ankara, it acquired numbers, signatures and a price tag. Secretary General Mark Rutte confirmed that the Alliance...
Sirens at Dawn: Iran Answers America’s Strikes
The sirens came before the sunrise. In Manama’s old quarters and along Kuwait City’s waterfront towers, the same rising wail that Gulf residents have learned by heart this year pulled families out of bed and into stairwells in the small hours of Wednesday...
Trump Dangles the F-35 in Ankara
Six years ago the United States took Turkey’s F-35s away. The jets Ankara had already paid for went into storage in the Arizona desert, Turkish pilots were sent home from Luke Air Force Base, and roughly 100 stealth fighters on order evaporated. On Tuesday,...
K2 Airways 737 Vanishes Over the Arabian Sea
The Boeing 737 freighter working K2 Airways flight 1732 on Tuesday evening was less than an hour from home. It had left Sharjah for Karachi with five crew and a hold full of cargo, a two-hour hop across the Arabian Sea that Pakistani freight operators fly so often it...
CENTCOM Hits 80 Targets in Overnight Iran Blitz
Eighty targets. One night. That is CENTCOM’s answer to Iran shooting at oil tankers again. Overnight into Wednesday, US forces worked their way down a target list across southern Iran: air defense systems, command-and-control networks, coastal radar sites,...
Messerschmitt: From the Bf 109 to a Bubble Car
On 23 May 1943, a German fighter ace named Adolf Galland climbed into an aircraft with no propeller. He opened the throttles, felt a shove of thrust unlike anything a piston engine had ever given him, and afterwards reached for the only words that fit: it was, he...
The Soviet Pilot Who Flew a Jet Under a Bridge
On a summer day in 1965, workers and fishermen along the Ob River near Novosibirsk heard a scream of jet engines and looked up just in time to see something their minds could barely accept: a MiG-17 fighter, flashing low over the water — and then vanishing under the...
Su-30 vs MiG-29: Two Halves of One Soviet Idea
Ask which is better, the MiG-29 or the Su-30, and you have already misunderstood the question. They were never meant to compete. They are the two halves of a single idea — the Soviet Union’s deliberate decision to build one small fighter and one big one, each...
The Soviet Scientist Who Accidentally Gave America Stealth
The most important document in the history of stealth aircraft was not written in California or at a secret desert airfield. It was written in Moscow, in Russian, by a Soviet physicist — and the Soviet Union let it go abroad because it decided the work was of no...
The Kamikaze That Left Its Shadow on a Warship: HMS Sussex, 1945
Look at the side of the ship and you can see it: the ghost of an aeroplane. Two wings, a fuselage, even the struts of a fixed undercarriage — a full-size silhouette of an aircraft, printed onto grey naval steel. It is one of the strangest and most haunting photographs...
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