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...
S-71K Kovyor: Russia Shows Its Stealth Missiles in Egypt
Russia brought its new stealth weapons to a sand-coloured airfield on the Egyptian coast this week and, for the first time, let people photograph them. At the El Alamein International Airshow, sitting on the apron in front of a Su-57 Felon, were three air-launched...
Hawker Built a Mach 2.5 Fighter, Then Refused to Fly It
By the summer of 1958 the experimental shop at Hawker’s Kingston works held something very close to a complete aeroplane. The wing was built. The fuselage frames were joined. The undercarriage had been tested, the systems rigged, the wind-tunnel programme all...
Su-34 Production: Russia Has Built 212, Lost at Least 43
At an air festival at Mochishche aerodrome outside Novosibirsk in early August, someone photographed a Su-34 that had not been painted yet. Bare factory grey primer, straight out of the shop next door. It is a mundane picture that answers a question people have been...
Cessna 172 Crash at Montgomery Field Kills Two in San Diego
A Cessna 172 Skyhawk crashed and burned on a runway at Montgomery-Gibbs Executive Airport in San Diego on Monday evening. Two people on board were killed. San Diego police logged the crash at about 17:20 local time on 7 September. It was the Labor Day holiday, and...
ANA Flight 58: The Midair That Killed 162 Over Shizukuishi
A student fighter pilot four weeks into his posting, with twenty-one hours on type, was holding formation on his instructor at 28,000 feet over northern Japan. He saw the airliner about two seconds before it hit him, in his four o’clock. His right wing root...
Aeroflot 366: The Tu-124 That Ditched in the Neva
On 21 August 1963 a Tupolev Tu-124 ran out of fuel over the middle of Leningrad, glided for fourteen seconds, cleared a bridge, and landed on the River Neva without killing anybody. A tug that happened to be towing a raft of timber past the spot cast off, came...
GE Aerospace Wins DIU Contract for Mach 5 Derecho Testbed
The hard part of hypersonics is not going fast. It is going fast often enough to learn anything. Flight tests above Mach 5 are rare, enormously expensive and frequently one-shot. A programme might get a handful of attempts across a decade, and if two of them fail...
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