The People’s Fighter: Heinkel’s He 162 Volksjäger Was Built in 72 Days to Be Flown by Children
In September 1944, with Allied bombers reducing German cities to rubble and the Luftwaffe haemorrhaging experienced pilots at an unsustainable rate, the Reich Air Ministry issued one of the most desperate specifications in aviation history: design a jet fighter that...
The Soviet Airliner That Flew on Hydrogen — In 1988
On 15 April 1988, a modified Tupolev Tu-154 airliner took off from Moscow’s Zhukovsky airfield with one of its three engines running on liquid hydrogen. It climbed to altitude, flew a circuit, and landed without incident. The aircraft was designated Tu-155, and...
The Platypus Is Bleeding Out: Russia’s Su-34 Fullback Losses Are Outpacing Production
Share this story On 27 June 2025, Ukrainian Special Operations Forces struck Marinovka airbase in Russia’s Volgograd region. When the smoke cleared, four Sukhoi Su-34 Fullback fighter-bombers were destroyed on the ground. Four aircraft, gone in a single strike —...
Ukrainian F-16 Pilots Threw Away the NATO Playbook — Here’s What They Built Instead
Share this story The West gave Ukraine its best single-engine fighter. Then Ukraine’s pilots threw away the instruction manual. Since the first F-16 Fighting Falcons arrived in Ukrainian skies in August 2024, the pilots who fly them have compiled a combat record...
The Air Force Wants a 1,000-Mile Missile — and It Changes Everything
The United States Air Force has quietly dropped one of the most ambitious weapons requirements in recent memory: a new air-to-air missile capable of killing targets at a minimum distance of 1,000 nautical miles — roughly 1,150 statute miles. That is approximately ten...
How Fly-by-Wire Replaced Cables and Changed Everything
Share this story Before the F-16, every fighter jet on earth had a direct mechanical link between the pilot’s stick and the control surfaces. Steel cables, push rods, bellcranks — a system fundamentally unchanged since the Sopwith Camel. In 1974, General...
The German Jump Jet That Lost to Math
Share this story It is a grey morning at Bremen, late in the summer of 1971. On the concrete apron stands a stubby, hunched little jet, its camouflage still factory-fresh, the marking VAK 191 B painted along the nose. Three engines spool up at once and the noise is...
The Aircraft That Had No Wings
Share this story It is the morning of 18 September 1972, on a Dornier test field beside Lake Constance. There is no cockpit to climb into, no pilot to brief. The machine on the apron looks less like an aircraft than a fat steel cigar laid on its side: a smooth...
Russia’s Trainer Grows Teeth: Yak-130M Flies
Share this story At the Irkutsk Aviation Plant on 25 June 2026, a two-seat jet that has spent two decades teaching student pilots how to fly lifted off on a roughly 50-minute sortie, climbed no higher than 2,000 metres (about 6,600 ft) and held its speed below 600...
The 1929 Giant With Twelve Engines
Share this story It is 21 October 1929, and 169 people are about to do something no group of human beings has ever done: leave the ground together, in a single aircraft. On the surface of Lake Constance sits the reason — a flying boat so vast that the men...
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