OBOGS Explained: Why Fighter Pilots No Longer Breathe Pure Oxygen
Share this story Ask most people what a fighter pilot breathes and the answer comes back instantly: pure oxygen. It is one of those facts everyone knows, it was broadly true for about forty years, and today it is wrong in two separate directions. Modern fighters...
Beartrap: The Canadian Invention That Put Sea Kings on Destroyers
Share this story The flight deck of a destroyer escort is roughly the size of a tennis court. In a North Atlantic winter it does not hold still. It rolls through thirty degrees, pitches through eight, and rises and falls a distance best measured in storeys. Now put a...
Airplane Oxygen Masks: How Long They Last and Why They Get Hot
Share this story The panel above your head snaps open and four yellow cups drop on clear plastic tubes. Somewhere in the cabin a bag rustles. Within a minute or two, passengers start to notice a smell — hot metal, a hint of something scorched, the sort of smell...
Radar Warning Receivers: How a Fighter Knows It Is Being Hunted
Share this story Every radar that is looking for you has to shout to do it. That is the whole weakness of the thing. A fire-control radar cannot find a target without flooding the sky with energy, and any aircraft carrying the right antennas can hear that energy long...
HOTAS: Why Fighter Pilots Never Let Go of the Controls
Share this story A fighter pilot in a turning fight is pulling seven or eight times his own body weight. His vision is narrowing. He is breathing against a system designed to stop him blacking out. And he needs to change his radar mode, select a different missile, and...
Changi East: Singapore Opens a Runway Built for Fighters
Share this story At midnight on Friday, Singapore’s airfield map changed. A 3,660-metre runway that had been quietly under construction on the eastern edge of Changi became operational, and it belongs to the air force. Runway 03/21 at Changi Air Base (East) went...
Pikes Peak Airshow: Flying the F-35A Demo at 6,200 Feet
Share this story Every airshow demonstration you have ever watched was flown to a script written at sea level and then adjusted. At Colorado Springs this weekend, the adjustment is large. The Pikes Peak Regional Airshow is running today, the second of two days at...
The C-17 Eats the Runway. The Air Force Weighed How Much
Share this story The reel asks a good question. A C-17 weighs up to 585,000 pounds. It lands on dirt. So how does it stop without hoovering half the runway into four very expensive turbofans? The honest answer is that it does not avoid it. It eats the dirt, and the...
ASELSAN Flies Three EW Pods on Two TB2s and Jams a Live Radar
Share this story Suppressing an air defence system is one of the most expensive things an air force can do. It normally takes a dedicated aircraft, a specialised crew and a weapon that costs more than a house. Over Konya this month, ASELSAN did the first two-thirds of...
Lockheed L-133: America’s First Jet Fighter, Never Built
Share this story In March 1942, while the United States was still flying propeller fighters and would be for the rest of the war, Lockheed handed the Army Air Forces a proposal for a twin-engined jet with a canard foreplane, a blended wing and body, and a predicted...
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