Taiwan F-16 Block 70: First Two Jets Land After Six Weeks in Hawaii
Share this story Around noon on Friday, 2 October, an F-16 with a Republic of China flag spread across its instrument panel touched down at Chihhang Air Base in Taitung, on Taiwan’s Pacific coast. A second jet followed it in. After three years of slipped...
Red Sprites: The Lightning Above Storms Pilots Reported for Decades
Share this story For decades, some pilots who flew near big thunderstorms at night came home with a story they were reluctant to tell. Above the storm, well above the cloud tops where lightning has no business being, they had seen flashes of light shooting upward into...
Third Carrier for Iran? USS Theodore Roosevelt Deploys From San Diego
Share this story USS Theodore Roosevelt slipped out of San Diego on Sunday, 27 September, with no sailors manning the rails and no ceremony. A day later the amphibious assault ship USS Makin Island followed with the 13th Marine Expeditionary Unit aboard. According to...
How the B-2 Navigates by the Stars: Astro-Inertial Navigation Explained
Share this story Somewhere on the upper surface of every B-2 Spirit is a small round window that has nothing to do with the crew. Behind it sits a telescope that looks for stars. While the bomber flies, that system measures the angles to known stars and uses them to...
Throwback Thursday: When MiGFlug Flew the MiG-25, MiG-31 and Su-27
Share this story It is Thursday, so we did something we rarely do: we went back through the Internet Archive’s Wayback Machine and read our own old websites. The oldest copy of migflug.com it holds dates from February 2005. Its page title was “MiG Flights...
Every U-2 Shot Down: The Seven Spy Planes Lost to Missiles
Share this story The Lockheed U-2 was built around one idea: fly high enough and nobody can touch you. At 70,000 feet in the mid-1950s, that was true. No Soviet fighter could climb that high and stay there, and the first generation of Soviet missiles could not reach...
Red Erwin: The B-29 Radioman Who Threw a Burning Bomb Out the Window
Share this story The bomb was supposed to fall away into the sky. Instead it came back up the chute and hit Staff Sergeant Henry Erwin in the face, burning at around 1,300°F (about 700°C). Within seconds he was blind, his clothes were on fire, and thick white...
Eric Slover: The Night Stalker Who Held His Chinook Under Fire
Share this story On the night of 3 January 2026, the first helicopter into one of the most sensitive raids in recent American history was an Army MH-47 Chinook flown by Chief Warrant Officer 5 Eric Slover. Minutes later he had four bullets in his leg. Seven weeks...
Stratolaunch Roc: The Widest Aircraft Ever Flown, Now a Hypersonic Mothership
Share this story On the morning of 13 April 2019, the widest aircraft ever built rolled down the runway at Mojave in California, lifted two fuselages and six engines off the ground, and flew for two and a half hours. Its wings stretched 385 feet from tip to tip, wider...
Missile Approach Warning Systems: How Aircraft See Heat-Seekers Coming
Share this story A radar-guided missile announces itself. The radar that guides it lights up the target aircraft, and a radar warning receiver hears it. A heat-seeking missile gives no such courtesy. It homes passively on the heat of an engine, and the first sign of...
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