Shershen: Ukraine’s SAM That Fires Almost Any Air-to-Air Missile
An air-to-air missile is built on an assumption: that something else will carry it to the fight. It expects to be released at nine or ten kilometres, already doing Mach 0.9, from a wing rail that has spent twenty minutes climbing. It expects a fighter radar to tell it...
UMPK Glide Bombs: Russia Dropped a Reported 8,766 in August
Somewhere over the Luhansk region, a Russian Su-34 Fullback pulls into a shallow climb at around 12,000 metres, holds it for a few seconds, and lets go of four objects that look like ordinary bombs wearing borrowed wings. The aircraft never crosses the front line. It...
NTSB: 21 Air 767 Touched Down on Miami Runway 30 at 158 Knots
On 9 September the National Transportation Safety Board published the first hard numbers from the Miami accident. They are not a verdict. They are a list of times, speeds and annunciations read off two recorders in a laboratory in Washington, and the agency attached...
Trump Denies Muwaffaq Salti Aircraft Damage Reports
Two accounts of the same night at the same air base went public within a day of each other this week. They do not agree. The first came from US officials speaking on condition of anonymity to CBS News, to Reuters and to Air & Space Forces Magazine. In their...
Moldova Drone Alert: Zelensky’s A319 Delayed, Not Near-Hit
The white jet with the blue-and-yellow tail sat on the apron at Chișinău on Tuesday afternoon with nowhere to go. Volodymyr Zelensky was due in Oslo that evening for the funeral of King Harald V, a state occasion with more than 150 inbound flights and a...
F-15EX Drops Live Bombs for the First Time at Nellis AFB
For thirty-odd years, the Oregon Air National Guard had exactly one job: shoot down the other guy. Its F-15 C-models were pure air-superiority machines, and the wing was very good at it. Bombing was somebody else’s problem. On 27 August 2026, an F-15EX Eagle II...
Europe’s Most Extreme Airports: Highest, Steepest, Shortest
The timetable at Barra Airport in the Outer Hebrides is not fixed. It cannot be. The runway is a beach, and twice a day the Atlantic covers it. The United Kingdom’s aeronautical information publication states the position without drama: aerodrome availability is...
The 70/50 Takeoff Rule: What the FAA Says and Where It Fails
Halfway down the runway, the decision is already made. Either the aeroplane is accelerating the way the handbook said it would, or it is not, and in the second case the only variable left is how much runway remains to stop in. The 70/50 rule exists to force that...
Shortest Takeoff Distance: From Valdez STOL Records to Airliners
Pioneer Field sits at sea level on the edge of Prince William Sound, and every May a steady breeze rolls in off the water. On 12 May 2018 that breeze was blowing 12 to 15 knots straight down the runway when Frank Knapp lined up a yellow, slat-winged Piper Cub that...
Fin Markings Decoded: What Air Force Tail Codes Mean
Stand at the fence at almost any air base and the fin of a fighter will tell you, if you can read it, which country owns the aircraft, which base it lives at, which squadron flies it, which year it was ordered, and occasionally whether the person strapped into it...
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