Ram Air Turbine Explained: The Emergency Propeller on Your Jet
Share this story Every airliner and many military jets carry a small propeller that the passengers hope never to see. It sits folded inside the fuselage or a wing fairing, and it only comes out on the worst day of a crew’s career: when every engine-driven...
Drop Tanks Explained: Why Fighter Jets Throw Away Their Fuel Tanks
Share this story Look at almost any photo of a fighter on a real mission and you will see them: big, smooth, bullet-shaped pods hanging under the wings or the belly. They are not bombs or missiles. They are fuel tanks, and many of them are designed to be thrown away...
MiG-21 Nose Cone Explained: How the Shock Cone Feeds a Mach 2 Jet
Share this story Look a MiG-21 in the face and the first thing you see is a hole with a cone in it. The whole nose of the aircraft is one big round air intake, and sitting in the middle of it, like the stopper in a bottle, is a pointed cone. That cone is not...
Ted Swartz: The US Navy Skyhawk Pilot Who Downed a MiG-17
Share this story The A-4 Skyhawk was built to bomb things. It was small, light and nimble, and in Vietnam it hauled bombs and rockets into some of the most heavily defended airspace in history. Shooting down enemy fighters was the job of the Crusaders and Phantoms...
Operation Tagar and Dugman 5: Israel’s Worst Day Against the SAMs
Share this story On the morning of 7 October 1973, the second day of the Yom Kippur War, the Israeli Air Force set out to do the thing it had been planning for years. It would destroy the Egyptian surface-to-air missile belt along the Suez Canal, and with it the...
Kazakhstan’s Second Airbus A400M Rolls Out in Gloss Grey
Share this story Kazakhstan’s second Airbus A400M has its paint on. Airbus released photographs on 1 October of the airlifter at its final assembly line in Seville, Spain, finished in a glossy grey scheme with “Kazakhstan Air Force” on the forward...
KLM’s First Airbus A350 Lands: PH-ZNA “De Nachtwacht”
Share this story KLM’s long-haul future touched down at Schiphol on Friday afternoon, 2 October. Airbus A350-900 PH-ZNA, named “De Nachtwacht” after Rembrandt’s Night Watch, landed in Amsterdam after a delivery flight from Toulouse, the first...
SRC Ghost Mantis Picked for USAF Large Aircraft Missile Warning
Share this story Tankers, airlifters and airborne radar aircraft are big, slow and impossible to hide. They are also, increasingly, the targets that very-long-range air-to-air missiles are built to kill. On 1 October the US Air Force moved to give them a better chance...
Golden Arrows at 75: No. 17 Squadron, From MiG-21 to Rafale
Share this story Seventy-five years ago, on 1 October 1951, the Indian Air Force formed a new squadron equipped with Harvard trainers. Today No. 17 Squadron, the Golden Arrows, flies the Rafale out of Ambala, and on 1 October 2026 it celebrated its platinum jubilee...
Boeing SPEEA Contract Ratified: Engineer Strike Averted
Share this story Boeing can breathe out. On 1 October, members of SPEEA, the union that represents the company’s engineers and technical workers, voted to accept new four-year contracts, ending the threat of a strike that could have begun the following week. It...
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