Wake Turbulence: The Invisible Tornado Behind Every Airliner
Share this story On 7 January 2017, a Bombardier Challenger 604 was cruising at 34,000 feet over the Arabian Sea, roughly 500 nautical miles from the nearest land. An Emirates A380 passed 1,000 feet overhead in the opposite direction, entirely legally.Forty-seven...
Mach Tuck: The Dive That Nearly Killed the First Jet Pilots
Share this story In October 1947, Chuck Yeager pulled back on the control column of the Bell X-1 at Mach 0.94 and nothing happened. The aircraft carried on exactly as before, as though the stick were not connected to anything.He shut down the rocket motor. As the X-1...
Compressor Stall: Why a Jet Engine Coughs Fire
Share this story A jet engine is a machine for keeping air moving in one direction. When it briefly stops doing that, the result is spectacular: a bang like an explosion, a sheet of flame out of the tailpipe, sometimes out of the intake as well, and an aircraft that...
NASA Goes Shopping for a New Jet
Share this story For more than sixty years, the sound of an astronaut heading to work has been the shriek of a Northrop T-38 Talon. Now NASA is starting to think about what comes next. The agency’s Johnson Space Center has opened market research for a modern jet...
The B-52s Are Coming Back to Spain
Share this story The United States is quietly building more room for its heavy bombers in southern Spain. Under a new military-construction plan, the U.S. Air Force wants to expand the apron at Morón Air Base near Seville so it can park up to nine B-52...
The Shahed Just Got a Jet Engine
Share this story The Shahed used to buzz. Now it screams. Russia has thrown its production weight behind a jet-powered version of the Iranian-designed attack drone, and the shift is turning a slow, propeller-driven nuisance into a genuinely hard target — one...
France Eyes a Fighter Built With Sweden
Share this story When Emmanuel Macron flew to Stockholm at the end of August, the headline deal was maritime: four French frigates for the Swedish navy, a multi-billion-euro vote of confidence in NATO’s newest member. But tucked alongside it was something that...
A Drone Crosses Into Estonia
Share this story Before dawn on Tuesday, sirens and phone alerts woke residents across eight regions of Estonia. A drone had crossed the country’s southeastern frontier, and a second was tracking toward the border city of Narva. On the runway at Ämari Air...
A Carcinogen Turns Up in the Missile Force
Share this story It started with one Airman, one routine inspection, and one smear of residue that should not have been there. Weeks later, the U.S. Air Force has yanked an entire family of test equipment out of its nuclear missile force — because the gear that...
Japan’s Ship-Killer Grows Fangs
Share this story Buried in Japan’s record ¥8.89 trillion (about $56 billion) defence budget request for fiscal 2027 is a single phrase that quietly redraws the country’s air-combat ambitions. The Ministry of Defense now describes the ASM-3 —...
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