FQ-42 Vengeance and FQ-44 Fury: USAF Wants 500 CCAs by 2032
Three numbers changed on Monday morning, and one name. Speaking at the Air & Space Forces Association’s conference in National Harbor, Secretary of the Air Force Troy Meink said the service now intends to have at least 500 Collaborative Combat Aircraft in...
Amazon Cuts Off 21 Air After the Miami 767 Overrun Killed Five
In commercial aviation, the customer almost never fires the airline. Shippers and carriers are bound together by long contracts, aircraft leases, crew bases and slot allocations, and the whole arrangement is built to survive bad weeks. Investigations take a year or...
Space Force On-Orbit Weapons: America Admits It Has Them
For decades the American position on weapons in orbit was a careful non-answer. Officials talked about resilience, about protecting assets, about counter-space capability in the abstract. Nobody said the United States had put weapons up there. On Monday morning at...
Swarm Aero Gamera: A $10 Million Drone That Carries Bomber Missiles
The United States bought 337 MQ-9 Reapers over the nineteen-year life of the programme. After the fighting with Iran, the Air Force has roughly 135 left, against a floor it says should be 189. That is the arithmetic behind everything that happened on the show floor at...
Northrop Lumberjack: A Strike Drone That Flies Without GPS
Every satellite navigation signal that reaches the Earth’s surface arrives weaker than the background noise of the universe. A GPS satellite transmits from 20,000 kilometres up on roughly the power of a car headlight. By the time that signal reaches a receiver...
airBaltic Files Chapter 11: €350 Million to Keep Flying
airBaltic does not fly to the United States. It never has. Its aircraft are Canadian-built, its shareholders are Latvian and German, its passengers are overwhelmingly European, and its longest route tops out somewhere around the Gulf. On Monday it walked into a...
Lockheed Vectis: Four More Prototypes, First Flight 2027
The model on the show floor at National Harbor is 34 feet long and you can walk all the way around it. There is no cockpit, no canopy, no windscreen, nothing for a human head to sit behind. What there is, on top of the fuselage where an intake has no business being,...
The Morphing Wing Already Flew, in 1985, on an F-111
A reel doing the rounds this week promises that the days of heavy mechanical flaps are numbered, and that flexible composite wings which morph in flight are about to arrive and change everything. Smooth wings that bend instead of hinging, no gaps, less drag, less...
The Little Bird the Pentagon Blurred in the Dude 44 Rescue Video
When the backseater known as Dude 44 Bravo broke his silence on 60 Minutes, most of the coverage went to what he said. The more durable part of the broadcast was what it showed. Alongside the interview, CBS aired video of both rescues that had not been seen publicly...
Upper Heyford 1992: The F-111 Crew Who Stayed at the Controls
On the afternoon of Thursday 17 September 1992, an F-111E was coming home to RAF Upper Heyford in Oxfordshire after a routine training flight. In the cockpit sat Captain Jerry C. Lindh, the pilot, and Major David “Mike” McGuire, his weapon systems officer,...
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