Battle of the Coral Sea: The Carrier Duel Fought Over the Horizon
Share this story Shortly after midday on 7 May 1942, a radio crackled in the flag plot of a US carrier task force somewhere south of the Louisiade Archipelago. The voice belonged to Lieutenant Commander Robert E. Dixon, leading the dive bombers of Lexington’s Scouting...
MQ-9 Reapers in Latin America: SOUTHCOM’s Drone Surge Explained
Share this story “¡Drones Reaper: los nuevos cazadores del narcotráfico!” The post from Ecuador’s Ministry of Defence this week did not bother with subtlety. Reaper drones, it announced, are the new hunters of drug trafficking. Defence Minister Gian Carlo Loffredo...
MH17: How a Buk Missile Destroyed Malaysia Airlines Flight 17
Share this story At 13:20 UTC on 17 July 2014, a Boeing 777 in Malaysia Airlines colours was cruising at 33,000 feet over the wheat fields of the Donetsk region, a little under three hours out of Amsterdam. The cockpit voice recorder was running. The crew had no...
Sikorsky Black Hawk 2070: Pilotless U-Hawk Due to Fly This Year
Share this story Somewhere in a Sikorsky hangar in Connecticut sits a Black Hawk with no cockpit. Where the pilots used to sit there are two clamshell doors and a loading ramp. Before the end of 2026, if Sikorsky keeps its word, it will lift off with nobody on board...
Operation Homecoming 1973: The Hanoi Taxi Flies the POWs Home
Share this story A column of buses stops beside a bomb-damaged hangar at Gia Lam Airport, Hanoi, just after noon on 12 February 1973. Inside are 116 American prisoners of war in identical new jackets that their captors issued a few days earlier. Most of them have...
JIATF 401 Directed Energy Pilot: Three Lasers and a Microwave
Share this story Seven months ago a counter-drone laser fired near Fort Bliss and the Federal Aviation Administration shut the sky over El Paso. On Monday 5 October the Pentagon answered that embarrassment with a shopping list: three high-energy lasers and one...
Holding Patterns Explained: Why Airliners Circle Before Landing
Share this story The seatbelt sign has been on for twenty minutes. Below the wing, the same patchwork of Hertfordshire fields drifts past for the second time, then the third. The aircraft banks gently right, levels, flies straight for a minute, banks right again....
B-52 LRASM Integration: Navy Moves to Make the BUFF a Ship-Killer
Share this story The document is three paragraphs long, posted to a federal contracting website at 12:50 UTC on Tuesday 7 October. It names no price and no delivery date. What it does name is a bomber that first flew in 1952 and a missile built to find a warship on...
Lufthansa Flight 181: The Landshut Hijacking and the Jet’s Return
Share this story Shortly after leaving Palma de Mallorca on the afternoon of Thursday, 13 October 1977, somewhere over the south of France, a young man with a pistol walked into the cockpit of a Lufthansa Boeing 737. The holiday flight to Frankfurt was carrying 86...
F-35 for Portugal: Rubio Makes His Pitch to Replace the F-16
Share this story Diplomats usually leave the sales talk to the manufacturers. Not this time. At a joint press conference in the Palácio das Necessidades in Lisbon on 8 October, a reporter asked US Secretary of State Marco Rubio which jet Portugal should buy to replace...
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