Share this story Most of what an air force does in secret stays secret. Occasionally, though, the secret taxis past a photographer in broad daylight. That is what happened at RAF Akrotiri, where the British Ministry of Defence has just released official photographs of...
Share this story Hunting a modern submarine is one of the most demanding tasks in military aviation. It means hours of patient, fuel-hungry orbits over empty ocean, listening for a contact that may never appear. It is precisely the kind of dull, exhausting,...
Share this story On a September morning in 1962, the air traffic controllers at Van Nuys Airport made a phone call. They told the local police and fire departments to stand by. Out on the ramp sat the most absurd aeroplane anyone there had ever seen — a Boeing...
Share this story On a freezing afternoon in May 1942, on a frozen lake near the Ural town of Bilimbay, a stubby green aeroplane the size of a fighter trainer crouched on the snow. It carried no propeller. In its tail sat a steel chamber fed by red fuming nitric acid...
Share this story On the morning of 17 March 1947, two test pilots lifted a four-engined jet off the hard-packed lakebed at Muroc, in the California high desert, and into a clear blue sky. The aircraft was ungainly, slab-sided, and unmistakably a product of the piston...
Share this story In the late 1960s, a CIA analyst sat staring at a grainy satellite photograph of the Caspian Sea and could not make the numbers work. The machine in the frame was nearly 100 metres long — longer than a Boeing 747 — yet it was clearly...
Share this story South Korea just put the world on notice. In a slickly produced video released in February 2026, defence and rail group Hyundai Rotem revealed a concept for an air-launched hypersonic anti-ship cruise missile, built on the same scramjet technology...
Share this story Turkey has just told the world it’s building a fighter jet engine in the same thrust class as the one inside the F-35 — and the claim is equal parts genuinely impressive and quietly confusing. The short version: Turkey’s indigenous-engine...
Share this story Fifteen minutes past midnight, 26 September 1983. In a command bunker called Serpukhov-15, south-west of Moscow, Lieutenant Colonel Stanislav Petrov is settled into the commander’s chair for a night shift he was not originally scheduled to work. In...
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