Radar Jamming Techniques: Noise, Deception and DRFM Explained
Share this story A radar is a very simple liar detector. It shouts a pulse into the dark, waits, and measures how long the echo takes to come back. Distance is just time multiplied by the speed of light and halved. There is no judgement in it and no scepticism....
Airbus U740 Valkyrie: First Flight for Europe’s Combat Drone
Share this story Somewhere over northern Europe on Monday morning, a slim grey wedge with no cockpit sat on a launch rail, lit a rocket booster and went flying. No runway. No pilot. No ladder, no canopy, no crew bus. The aircraft is the Airbus U740 Valkyrie, and it...
ARIA: The Flying Radio Stations That Talked to Apollo 11
Share this story About seven minutes before Apollo 11’s third stage fired to send it to the Moon on 16 July 1969, the spacecraft was over the open Pacific, far from any ground station. Houston was still talking to the crew, through a modified Air Force jet...
Interned in Switzerland: The US Bomber Crews Who Landed in a Neutral Country
Share this story For a crippled American bomber over southern Germany in 1944, Switzerland was often the nearest safe ground. Between August 1943 and April 1945, 166 US bombers came down there. Their crews were safe from the war, but not free: under international law,...
Henschel Hs 117 Schmetterling: Not the First SAM, but the Closest to Service
Share this story By 1943 Allied bomber streams were pounding German cities by day and night, and the Luftwaffe’s fighters and flak could not stop them. One answer was a weapon that did not yet exist anywhere: a guided missile fired from the ground at aircraft....
The Day a Fish Hit a Jet: Alaska Airlines, Juneau, 1987
Share this story Pilots are trained for bird strikes. Nobody trains for fish. Yet on 30 March 1987, an Alaska Airlines Boeing 737 climbing out of Juneau, Alaska, was hit by a fish that had been dropped by an eagle. The story ran in newspapers on 1 April, so plenty of...
China’s Anti-Stealth Radars: Detection Is Not a Firing Solution
Share this story Every two years at Zhuhai, China parks a row of radar trucks on the apron and lets the world photograph them. The placards promise a great deal. Metre-wave arrays that see what microwave radars cannot. Passive sets that never transmit....
Dexedrine and Ambien: The Go Pills and No-Go Pills USAF Aircrew Carry
Share this story It begins with a reclining chair and an hour of pure oxygen. Before a U-2 Dragon Lady pilot climbs towards 70,000 feet, the physiological support team seals him into a yellow full-pressure suit, screws on the helmet and parks him in a lounger to flush...
FADEC Explained: The Computer That Really Runs a Jet Engine
Share this story When a fighter pilot slams the throttle into afterburner, it feels like a direct command to the engine. It is not. On a modern jet the throttle is a request, sent as an electrical signal to a box of electronics bolted to the engine, and that box...
PAC-3 Seekers: Boeing Has to Triple Output of the Patriot’s Eyes
Share this story Every PAC-3 interceptor fired by a Patriot battery depends on one component made in Huntsville, Alabama: the radar seeker in its nose. Boeing builds it as a subcontractor to Lockheed Martin, and with Patriot stocks drained by wars in Ukraine and the...
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