AV-8B Harrier: The Last One Built for the Marines Goes to a Museum
There was no flypast for this one. No water cannon, no speeches, no crowd on the ramp at Cherry Point. Marines took the wings off it, pulled the classified boxes out, put it on a flatbed and drove it to Florida. The aircraft is BuNo 166288, modex WP-18, and it is the...
RAF Fairford: A Business Jet Landed at the Bomber Base by Mistake
Just after nine on Saturday morning, a nine-seat business jet greased onto a runway built for heavy bombers. The pilot had been aiming for a quiet private airfield in the Cotswolds. He got the United States Air Force instead. The aircraft was D-CJMK, a Cessna 560XLS+...
KC-46A Exports: America Just Tripled Its Tanker Sales Ceiling
The US Air Force has just raised the spending ceiling on its Boeing KC-46A export contract from $5.7 billion to $19.1 billion. No aircraft were ordered. No money changed hands. It is, on paper, one of the least dramatic $13.4 billion announcements you will ever read....
Northrop X-21A: The Plane With 800,000 Slots in Its Wings
Drag is the tax every aircraft pays for existing. On a transport aircraft in cruise, about half of that drag is nothing more than friction between the skin and the air. In the early 1960s Northrop and the United States Air Force went after that tax directly, with an...
USAF Seeks Medium-Caliber Guns to Defend Its Air Bases
For thirty years the United States Air Force has fought wars in which nothing much threatened its airfields. Aircraft were parked in neat rows in the open because nobody could reach them. That assumption is gone. And the Air Force’s response is to go looking for...
Northrop Lumberjack Drone Flies GPS-Free on Quantum Navigation
Jam the satellites and most modern weapons go stupid. That is the whole premise of electronic warfare in 2026, and it is why every air force on earth is quietly panicking about how much of its inventory depends on a faint signal broadcast from 20,000 kilometres up. So...
Anthem: The Cheap Cruise Missile the US Army Is Flight-Testing
On the morning of 6 August 2026, somewhere in the scrub outside Tan-Tan on Morocco’s Atlantic coast, a fat orange object with stubby wings and a jet engine bolted under its belly rolled forward, lit a rocket booster, and climbed away into a bruised dawn sky. It looked...
Trump Denies Muwaffaq Salti Aircraft Damage Reports
Two accounts of the same night at the same air base went public within a day of each other this week. They do not agree. The first came from US officials speaking on condition of anonymity to CBS News, to Reuters and to Air & Space Forces Magazine. In their...
F-15EX Drops Live Bombs for the First Time at Nellis AFB
For thirty-odd years, the Oregon Air National Guard had exactly one job: shoot down the other guy. Its F-15 C-models were pure air-superiority machines, and the wing was very good at it. Bombing was somebody else’s problem. On 27 August 2026, an F-15EX Eagle II...
B-21 Raider: Whiteman Gets a $74.8M Signature-Test Hangar
You can learn a surprising amount about a secret aeroplane from the buildings people put up for it. On 10 September 2026, the US Army Corps of Engineers awarded Conti Federal Services a $74.8 million contract to build a radio frequency and measurements hangar for the...
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