Su-30MKI: Why the Indian Air Force Flies With Two Crew
Line up the world’s major air forces and count the seats. The United States Air Force flies the F-22, the F-16 and the F-35 with one pilot. The F-35 has no two-seat variant in any version, for any customer. France flies mostly single-seat Rafales. China’s J-20 is...
Tarom’s First 737 MAX Arrives as Its Rescue Plan Slips
At 18:51 on the evening of 8 September, a Boeing 737-8 registered YR-BGO touched down at Henri Coandă in Bucharest, having flown in directly from the United States. It is the first 737 MAX Tarom has ever operated, and the first in Romania. Boeing, Tarom and the lessor...
DARC: The Space Force Picks Texas for Its Last Deep-Space Radar
Geostationary orbit is 36,000 km up, which is far enough that the satellites parked there appear not to move at all. It is where the most valuable military hardware in space lives: communications relays, missile-warning satellites, intelligence platforms. It is also,...
Trump Tells Ukraine to Stop Hitting Russian Refineries
Ukraine spent two years building the one capability that reaches deep into Russia and actually hurts. On Sunday, the President of the United States asked it to stop using that capability on the target it works best against. Speaking to reporters at his Doonbeg golf...
Tu-95 at Engels-2: A Second Bomber Russia Cannot Replace
Russia stopped building the Tupolev Tu-95 in 1992 and scrapped the tooling three years later. That single fact is what makes the satellite imagery coming out of Engels-2 worth paying attention to. On the night of Friday 28 August, Ukraine’s SBU struck the strategic...
Lackland’s Airbase Range: Air Force Recruits Now Rearm an F-16
Air Force basic training now includes a task that would have been unthinkable for a recruit ten years ago: walk up to a fighter, hang a missile on it, and do it as a team you organised yourself. The Air Base Training Range at Joint Base San Antonio-Lackland is nearly...
B-1 and B-52 Readiness: Global Strike Claims Wins, Withholds Rates
Air Force Global Strike Command has published a progress report on its effort to fix bomber readiness, and it contains one conspicuous absence: any mission capable rate. The North Star Readiness Campaign began in the summer of 2025 and reached its first anniversary...
AV-8B Harrier: The Last One Built for the Marines Goes to a Museum
There was no flypast for this one. No water cannon, no speeches, no crowd on the ramp at Cherry Point. Marines took the wings off it, pulled the classified boxes out, put it on a flatbed and drove it to Florida. The aircraft is BuNo 166288, modex WP-18, and it is the...
Rafale F5: France Orders the First Contracts After FCAS Died
For most of a decade, France told itself a story about the 2040s in which the Rafale was a bridge to something else. That something else was FCAS, the Franco-German-Spanish Future Combat Air System, and in June it broke apart. Which leaves Dassault with an aircraft...
Dude 44 Bravo: The F-15E Backseater Breaks His Silence on Iran
For five months the United States Air Force has said almost nothing about the man it went back for. He has no name in the public record. He has a call sign, and that is deliberate: Dude 44 Bravo, the weapons systems officer of an F-15E Strike Eagle that came apart...
Recent Comments