North Korea Shows Its Drone Production Lines, Not Just Its Drones
Share this story North Korea does not usually show you the factory. It shows you the parade, the launch, the finished missile on the transporter, and then the cameras go away. So when Rodong Sinmun published photographs on Saturday of Kim Jong Un walking through drone...
Marines Take EABO Into Combat for the First Time in Epic Fury
Share this story The Marine Corps spent six years arguing about Expeditionary Advanced Base Operations. Critics called it a PowerPoint concept built for a war with China that might never come. Supporters called it the future. Nobody had done it while being shot at....
Luxembourg Airport Shut for a Night by Unidentified Drones
Share this story Friday evening, around nine o’clock, somebody flew something over Luxembourg Airport that had no business being there. Within minutes the busiest cargo hub in the Grand Duchy had stopped moving aircraft altogether. The suspension lasted through the...
Finland’s First F-35s Land at Rovaniemi, Inside the Arctic Circle
Share this story At 17:45 local time on Friday, the wheels of a Finnish F-35A Lightning II touched the runway at Rovaniemi, eight kilometres south of the Arctic Circle, with yellowing birch forest on both sides. A second followed. Finland has been paying for this...
Saudi Arabia F-35 Sale: State Department Clears 48 Jets
Share this story Saudi Arabia has been asking for the F-35 for years. On Thursday it finally got an answer, and the answer was yes. The US State Department approved a possible sale of 48 F-35 Lightning II fighters to the kingdom, an estimated $24.3 billion package...
Italian Typhoon Hit at Ta’if: Houthi Strike Damages an F-2000
Share this story Fighter jets are hardest to kill in the air. On the ground they are aluminium, composite and kerosene, sitting still under a sunshade, and the only thing between them and a warhead is geometry. Overnight on 17 September, at King Fahd Air Base outside...
Doak VZ-4: The 1958 Tilt-Duct That Predicted the Air Taxi
Share this story The landing gear came off a Cessna 182. The seats came out of a P-51 Mustang. The actuators that swivelled the ducts were taken from a T-33. In February 1958 this assembly of other people’s parts hovered, then flew forwards, and in doing so...
Vincent Burnelli: The Man Who Made the Fuselage Fly
Share this story Vincent Burnelli spent nearly fifty years arguing that the fuselage of an aeroplane should not be a tube. It should be a wing. He built aircraft that proved it worked. He never sold one in quantity. One survives, sitting outdoors in Connecticut, and...
Bell XP-77: America’s Wooden Lightweight Fighter
Share this story In 1941 the US Army Air Forces asked a sensible question. What if aluminium ran short, and what if the enemy could be fought with something small, cheap and made of wood? Bell answered with the XP-77: a fighter the size of a racing aeroplane, built...
US Air Force at 79: The Day It Became Its Own Service
Share this story Seventy-nine years ago today, the United States stopped treating air power as something the Army did on the side. On 18 September 1947 the National Security Act came into force and the United States Air Force became a service in its own right, with...
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