Nellis A-10 Departure: The Warthog Leaves Fighter Town USA
Share this story Nearly seventy airmen lined the flight line at Nellis Air Force Base on Tuesday morning and saluted an aeroplane. The A-10 Thunderbolt II lifted off into a cloudless Nevada sky, turned out over Las Vegas, and did not come back. That was the last...
Miss Demeanour Crashes: ATAC Hawker Hunter Lost Off California
Share this story For sixteen years she was the most photographed privately owned jet in Britain: a Hawker Hunter painted banana yellow at the nose, fading through red and blue into deep-space black at the tail, with a scatter of stars down the fuselage. Airshow crowds...
The 1982 Diamond Crash: Four Thunderbirds, One Jammed Stabiliser
Share this story The line abreast loop is not a difficult manoeuvre for four good pilots. You climb several thousand feet side by side, pull over the top in a slow inside loop, and come down the back of it at over four hundred miles an hour. Then you level off at...
Air Canada Kills Its Longest Route After Under Three Years
Share this story Air Canada launched Vancouver to Singapore in April 2024 with the language airlines use when they mean it: strategic expansion, preferred North American gateway to Asia, the only nonstop between the two countries. Two years and nine months later, it...
Davis-Monthan Inactivates Its Last A-10 Units
Share this story Four guidons were rolled and cased at Davis-Monthan on Friday. That is how the Air Force ends things: a flag wound around its staff, slid into a canvas sleeve, and a unit that existed on Thursday does not exist on Saturday. The 355th Operations Group,...
F-16 Crashes at Spangdahlem: Second US Falcon Lost in a Week
Share this story The golf course at Spangdahlem Air Base sits directly under the approach to Runway 04. On Tuesday afternoon it became a crash site. At roughly half past two local time, a F-16 Fighting Falcon belonging to the base resident 52nd Fighter Wing came down...
F-35 Parts Diverted to Hong Kong: Australia Confirms the Shipment
Share this story A crate of broken fighter parts is the least glamorous object in military aviation. Nobody guards it the way they guard a jet. It goes in a container, on a commercial aircraft, and turns up at a repair shop on the other side of the world. That is how...
FQ-42 Vengeance Flies Formation With an F-35A and an F-15E
Share this story Three aircraft, one photograph. On the left, an F-15E Strike Eagle in Nellis test markings, tail code OT. In the middle, an F-35A. On the right, something with no cockpit, no canopy, no pilot: a General Atomics FQ-42 Vengeance, sitting in formation as...
Houthi Strikes Called Off: Bombs Were Already on the Jets
Share this story Somewhere inside US Central Command’s area of operations on Sunday, ordnance crews were doing the job that makes a war real: lifting live weapons onto aeroplanes. Then the word came down to stop. President Donald Trump called off a planned...
Operation Tundra Merlin: An Arctic Kill Chain Off Dutch Harbor
Share this story A hundred nautical miles north of Dutch Harbor is not anywhere. It is grey water, weather that arrives sideways, and the shortest line between the Aleutians and the Russian Far East. This week it has an American and Canadian task force in it, and...
Recent Comments