Share this story In the early 1950s the United States, home of Boeing and Douglas and the world’s mightiest aircraft industry, went shopping abroad for a bomber. It bought a British one. The Martin B-57 Canberra — an American-built version of the English...
Share this story It usually announces itself with a bang — a sharp, cannon-like crack from the engine, sometimes a tongue of flame out the intake or exhaust, and a stomach-dropping sag in thrust. To a passenger it sounds like the engine has exploded. Usually, it...
Share this story In the early 1950s, the U.S. Air Force wanted a single machine that could climb fast, find a Soviet bomber on its own radar, and kill it with a bay full of missiles before it reached an American city. The answer was the F-102 Delta Dagger — the...
Share this story The U-2 shootdown over Sverdlovsk in 1960 settled an argument. Altitude was no longer sanctuary. If you wanted to reach a defended target, you would have to go under the radar rather than over it, at night, in weather, at a few hundred feet.Which...
Share this story On 7 January 2017, a Bombardier Challenger 604 was cruising at 34,000 feet over the Arabian Sea, roughly 500 nautical miles from the nearest land. An Emirates A380 passed 1,000 feet overhead in the opposite direction, entirely legally.Forty-seven...
Share this story In October 1947, Chuck Yeager pulled back on the control column of the Bell X-1 at Mach 0.94 and nothing happened. The aircraft carried on exactly as before, as though the stick were not connected to anything.He shut down the rocket motor. As the X-1...
Share this story A jet engine is a machine for keeping air moving in one direction. When it briefly stops doing that, the result is spectacular: a bang like an explosion, a sheet of flame out of the tailpipe, sometimes out of the intake as well, and an aircraft that...
Share this story Buried in Japan’s record ¥8.89 trillion (about $56 billion) defence budget request for fiscal 2027 is a single phrase that quietly redraws the country’s air-combat ambitions. The Ministry of Defense now describes the ASM-3 —...
A Ukrainian fiber-optic guided FPV drone. These wire-guided weapons are immune to electronic jamming and can strike targets over 20 kilometres away. (Wikimedia Commons) In February 2025, Ukraine became the first nation in history to establish a dedicated military...
Share this story Picture a small jet taking off with a perfectly ordinary straight wing. Then, in the air, the whole wing slowly pivots — not sweeping symmetrically back on both sides like a fighter, but rotating flat around its centre, until one tip points...
Share this story In the early 1960s, a boxy little jet rose slowly off the ground at a Lockheed test site in Georgia, hung in the air, and set down again. On the face of it, the Lockheed XV-4 Hummingbird had done the impossible-looking thing: vertical take-off on...
Share this story On 15 July 1941, a 28-year-old German pilot did something no one in the history of flight had done before: he shot down his hundredth aircraft. Werner Mölders had reached a number that once seemed impossible. Yet the record was not his most...
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