Pelican Ballistic Missile Debuts in Ukraine’s Moscow Strike
Kapotnya sits nine miles from the Kremlin. It is not a military district. It is chimneys and pipework and a wall of apartment blocks pressed right up against the fence, and on the night of 19 September it was lit from below by its own fires. By Sunday morning the...
A-10 Weapons School Closes While the Warthog Flies to 2030
On 18 August 2026 a single A-10C Thunderbolt II took off from Nellis Air Force Base, flew a training mission over the Nevada Test and Training Range, and landed. Nothing about the sortie was unusual except everything about it. The aircraft was 82-0665, the last A-10...
Great Circle Routes: Why Pacific Flights Curve North Past Alaska
Open a flight tracker halfway through a Los Angeles to Tokyo flight and the aircraft is somewhere it has no business being. Not out in the middle of the blue, where the straight line on the screen says it should be, but up near the top of the map, off the Aleutians,...
Airplane Oxygen Masks: How Long They Last and Why They Get Hot
The panel above your head snaps open and four yellow cups drop on clear plastic tubes. Somewhere in the cabin a bag rustles. Within a minute or two, passengers start to notice a smell — hot metal, a hint of something scorched, the sort of smell that in any other...
Thirteen Claims in Seventeen Minutes: The Arithmetic of Erich Rudorffer
On 6 November 1943, over the Soviet counter-offensive that became the Battle of Kiev, a German fighter pilot logged thirteen aerial victories between 13:00 and 13:17. Eight Yak-7s and five Yak-9s. Seventeen minutes. The pilot was Erich Rudorffer, and that afternoon...
Ski-Jump or Catapult: The Two Ways to Get a Jet Off a Ship
A carrier deck is about 300 metres long, and a loaded fighter needs something closer to a kilometre. That gap is the entire problem of naval aviation, and the world has settled on exactly two answers to it: throw the aeroplane, or tilt the end of the runway upwards....
Radar Warning Receivers: How a Fighter Knows It Is Being Hunted
Every radar that is looking for you has to shout to do it. That is the whole weakness of the thing. A fire-control radar cannot find a target without flooding the sky with energy, and any aircraft carrying the right antennas can hear that energy long before the radar...
Helmet-Mounted Displays: How Fighter Pilots Aim By Looking
In a close-in fight the old rule was brutally simple: to shoot at something, you had to point the aeroplane at it. The gunsight, and later the head-up display, sat fixed on the centreline, and everything a fighter pilot could kill had to be dragged into that narrow...
HOTAS: Why Fighter Pilots Never Let Go of the Controls
A fighter pilot in a turning fight is pulling seven or eight times his own body weight. His vision is narrowing. He is breathing against a system designed to stop him blacking out. And he needs to change his radar mode, select a different missile, and put out chaff....
V-1 Flying Bomb: The RAF Trick of Tipping It With a Wingtip
The V-1 flying bomb carried a warhead of several hundred kilograms of high explosive and crossed the Channel at roughly the speed of a fast fighter. Shooting one down meant closing to gun range behind it and firing into a warhead that might detonate in your face. So a...
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