Shershen: Ukraine’s SAM That Fires Almost Any Air-to-Air Missile
An air-to-air missile is built on an assumption: that something else will carry it to the fight. It expects to be released at nine or ten kilometres, already doing Mach 0.9, from a wing rail that has spent twenty minutes climbing. It expects a fighter radar to tell it...
NTSB: 21 Air 767 Touched Down on Miami Runway 30 at 158 Knots
On 9 September the National Transportation Safety Board published the first hard numbers from the Miami accident. They are not a verdict. They are a list of times, speeds and annunciations read off two recorders in a laboratory in Washington, and the agency attached...
The 70/50 Takeoff Rule: What the FAA Says and Where It Fails
Halfway down the runway, the decision is already made. Either the aeroplane is accelerating the way the handbook said it would, or it is not, and in the second case the only variable left is how much runway remains to stop in. The 70/50 rule exists to force that...
Ilyushin Il-102: The Jet Attacker With a Tail Gunner
In 1982, forty years after the last one made sense, a Soviet design bureau flew a jet attack aircraft with a rear gunner. Not a token installation. A proper remotely-controlled tail turret with a twin-barrelled 23 mm cannon, aimed by a second crewman sitting in his...
Battle of the Bismarck Sea: Bombing Ships at Fifteen Feet
In January 1943, Allied aircraft in New Guinea flew 416 sorties against a single Japanese convoy and sank two ships. Six weeks later, over three days in the Bismarck Sea, the same air force attacked another convoy and sank all eight transports and half its destroyer...
USAF Awards $149M for Bunker Buster Warhead Cases
The most expensive part of the biggest conventional bomb in the American inventory is not the explosive. It is the pipe it lives in. On 10 September 2026 the US Air Force awarded a combined $149 million to four companies to keep making those pipes: hardened steel...
Novy Urengoy: Ukraine’s Deepest Drone Strike of the War
Novy Urengoy sits above the Arctic Circle’s shoulder in northwestern Siberia, roughly 3,000 kilometres from the nearest Ukrainian territory. It is not a front line. It is not near one. It is the unofficial gas capital of the Russian Federation, and until...
Namsi 1951: Black Tuesday and the End of the B-29
Nine B-29s took off from Kadena on Okinawa on the morning of 23 October 1951. Their target was Namsi, a North Korean airfield still under construction, sitting about thirty miles from Antung — where roughly a hundred MiG-15s were based on the far side of a...
Boeing Offers the MQ-28 Ghost Bat to Japan
Japan is 6,800 islands long. Defending that coastline with crewed fighters means either an air force it cannot afford or gaps it cannot accept. Which is why Tokyo is now designing a coastal defence concept built around uncrewed aircraft — and why every large...
Pilatus PC-7 MKX: The First Dutch Trainer Takes Off
On Monday morning a white and red turboprop lifted off from Buochs, the airfield tucked under the mountains next to Pilatus’s factory in Stans, and flew a first sortie over central Switzerland. It carried the Swiss test registration HB-HCA and construction...
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