Navy CCA RFI: The Service Wants Its X-47B Combat Drone Back
Share this story Ten years ago the U.S. Navy had a stealthy, carrier-capable combat drone flying off the deck of a supercarrier — and then it walked away from it. This week the service quietly admitted it wants that aircraft back.On August 31, Naval Air Systems...
US Strikes Iran’s Air Defences as Missiles Fall on Jordan Air Base
Share this story The Strait of Hormuz war widened over the weekend, and for once the most consequential fighting was not over Iran at all. It was over Jordan, where American Patriot batteries spent part of Monday morning shooting down Iranian ballistic missiles aimed...
Silent Anvil: The Navy’s Torpedo That Glides to the Target
Share this story Dropping a torpedo on a submarine has always required getting uncomfortably close to it. The aircraft has to fly to roughly where the submarine is, and a submarine is exactly the sort of thing that objects to being approached. The U.S. Navy now wants...
Altius-700: A Black Hawk Rocket-Launches Anduril’s Drone
Share this story The U.S. Army just turned its workhorse troop taxi into a launch platform for autonomous killers. Footage released by Anduril on 31 August shows an H-60M Black Hawk rocket-launching an Altius-700 from an external pylon, the drone streaking away across...
NASA Goes Shopping for a New Jet
Share this story For more than sixty years, the sound of an astronaut heading to work has been the shriek of a Northrop T-38 Talon. Now NASA is starting to think about what comes next. The agency’s Johnson Space Center has opened market research for a modern jet...
The B-52s Are Coming Back to Spain
Share this story The United States is quietly building more room for its heavy bombers in southern Spain. Under a new military-construction plan, the U.S. Air Force wants to expand the apron at Morón Air Base near Seville so it can park up to nine B-52...
The Shahed Just Got a Jet Engine
Share this story The Shahed used to buzz. Now it screams. Russia has thrown its production weight behind a jet-powered version of the Iranian-designed attack drone, and the shift is turning a slow, propeller-driven nuisance into a genuinely hard target — one...
A Carcinogen Turns Up in the Missile Force
Share this story It started with one Airman, one routine inspection, and one smear of residue that should not have been there. Weeks later, the U.S. Air Force has yanked an entire family of test equipment out of its nuclear missile force — because the gear that...
Uzbekistan Confirms Its Chinese J-10CE Fighters
Share this story For months it was a rumour with photographs attached: Uzbekistan, a country whose air force has flown Soviet and Russian hardware since the day it existed, had quietly bought Chinese fighters. Then Uzbek state television settled it. In a long...
The Rutan Boomerang: Built Lopsided on Purpose
Share this story When Burt Rutan rolled his latest creation out at Oshkosh in 1996, the reaction from a crowd that worshipped him was more or less: what went wrong? The Boomerang looked broken. There was a small engine boom stuck to the left of the fuselage. The right...
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