Lackland’s Airbase Range: Air Force Recruits Now Rearm an F-16
Share this story 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...
B-1 and B-52 Readiness: Global Strike Claims Wins, Withholds Rates
Share this story 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...
AV-8B Harrier: The Last One Built for the Marines Goes to a Museum
Share this story 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...
Rafale F5: France Orders the First Contracts After FCAS Died
Share this story 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...
Dude 44 Bravo: The F-15E Backseater Breaks His Silence on Iran
Share this story 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...
RAF Fairford: A Business Jet Landed at the Bomber Base by Mistake
Share this story Just after nine on Saturday morning, a nine-seat business jet greased onto a runway built for heavy bombers. The pilot had been aiming for a quiet private airfield in the Cotswolds. He got the United States Air Force instead. The aircraft was D-CJMK,...
Switzerland Is Scrapping ILS as GPS Spoofing Hits Crews Daily
Share this story Swiss crews meet GPS spoofing every day. Switzerland is nonetheless switching its airports away from the ground-based landing system that spoofing cannot touch, and doing it to save money. That plan has just started to unravel. The Tages-Anzeiger...
Battle Damage Assessment: Why the First Number Is Always Wrong
Share this story In March 2026, Israel said it had destroyed Iran’s F-14 Tomcat fleet at Isfahan. Three months later Iranian state television showed a Tomcat coming home from a mission. Six months later, social media is still confidently announcing that the last...
Fighter Jet Takeoff and Landing: The Real Numbers, F-104 to F-35
Share this story A Lockheed F-104 Starfighter came down final approach at 175 knots with full flaps, and that was the basic number. The pilot then added five knots for every 1,000 pounds of fuel still in the tanks above the first thousand. On a typical recovery that...
CAD/PADs: Every Fighter Jet’s Explosives Have an Expiry Date
Share this story In August 2026 the US Air Force posted a contracting notice so dull that almost nobody read it. It concerned cartridge- and propellant-actuated devices for the F-117 Nighthawk — an aircraft officially retired in 2008. The internet noticed the...
Recent Comments