The 413th Flight Test Squadron does not fly rescue missions. It is a test unit. It puts helicopters through developmental trials and writes up the results. But when the Air Force Rescue Coordination Center calls, it is usually because everything else has already been...
The first generation of America’s robot fighters is already being built. The second generation is still an argument about engines. Speaking at the Air Force’s Life Cycle Industry Days conference in Dayton, Ohio, senior acquisition officials laid out where...
Ask a large language model for the combat radius of a foreign fighter and it will give you a number. Confident, specific, formatted like a fact. It may also be entirely invented. That is an inconvenience if you are writing a school essay. It is something else if you...
Poland has ordered 96 AH-64E Apache Guardians. When they arrive it will be the second-largest Apache fleet on earth, behind only the United States Army. Ninety-six attack helicopters is a headline. What happened at a factory in Łódź on 11 August 2026...
A fighter has a fixed number of places to hang things. Wings, fuselage, wingtips. Every pylon you fill with a bomb is a pylon you cannot fill with fuel, a targeting pod, or a missile to defend yourself with. That arithmetic has constrained air campaigns since the...
America’s defence against an intercontinental ballistic missile aimed at its homeland currently rests on 44 interceptors: 40 buried in silos at Fort Greely, Alaska, and four at Vandenberg in California. The design dates to the early 2000s. The replacement is...
On 14 August 2026 the Russian state news agency TASS reported that the two-seat Su-57D will be used to test combat artificial intelligence under development at the Sukhoi Design Bureau. The source was Mikhail Strelets, the bureau’s director, speaking on the...
The Netherlands bought the MQ-9 Reaper in 2011 as a pair of eyes. No weapons, no requirement for them, no intention of adding any. For fifteen years that held. On Thursday 20 August 2026, a Royal Netherlands Air Force MQ-9A took off from Leeuwarden carrying weapons...
Paraguay has not flown a jet combat aircraft since 2003, when the last Aermacchi-derived AT-26 Xavantes were retired. It has never flown a supersonic one. Now it is looking at a country 18,000 kilometres away that has just retired the largest fleet of Northrop F-5s...
In July 2025 the United States approved the sale of nine HH-60W Jolly Green II combat rescue helicopters to Norway. It was a specialised, expensive, superbly capable machine built for one demanding job: going into hostile territory to bring downed aircrew home. Norway...
For years the U.S. Navy has had a problem it could not shoot its way out of. Its best long-range air-to-air missile, the AIM-174B Gunslinger, is a magnificent weapon that only the F/A-18E/F Super Hornet can carry, and only hanging off a wing where every radar in the...
Here is a puzzle. A modern fighter jet is designed to fly something like 8,000 hours before its airframe is worn out. And yet, across NATO, air forces routinely retire their fighters long before they reach that limit — parking perfectly flyable jets in the...
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