$8.63 a Gallon: The Fuel Crisis Hitting Every Pilot
Share this story The price of Jet-A fuel in the United States averaged $8.63 per gallon in April 2026. That is $1.77 more than March. It is $2.03 more than a year ago. And it is more than double what it cost before Iran closed the Strait of Hormuz in late February....
The Jet Nobody Believed In Just Hit 500 Deliveries
Share this story It began life as a Canadian underdog. Bombardier’s CSeries was the aircraft that wasn’t supposed to survive — a small, clean-sheet design from a company that had never built anything bigger than a regional jet, taking on Boeing and Airbus on their...
Test Pilots Return From the Moon
Share this story At 8:07 PM Eastern Time on April 10, 2026, a blackened capsule trailing a wake of superheated plasma punched through Earth’s atmosphere at 25,000 miles per hour and splashed into the Pacific Ocean forty miles off the coast of San Diego. Inside were...
Raptor Pilot Takes Command at the Air Force Academy
Share this story The man who will shape the next generation of Air Force officers has 2,500 flight hours, 300 of them in combat, and has flown two of America’s most formidable fighters: the F-15C Eagle and the F-22 Raptor. Col. Brandon J. Tellez, a 2001 Air Force...
39 Aircraft Lost: The Full Cost of Epic Fury
Share this story Thirty-nine aircraft. More than 13,000 sorties. Five weeks of sustained air combat over and around Iran. The War Zone has published a comprehensive, open-source tracking of every US aircraft confirmed lost or damaged during Operation Epic Fury — and...
Nuclear Reactors Are Coming to Air Force Bases
Share this story In February 2026, a C-17 Globemaster III lifted a nuclear reactor off the tarmac at March Air Reserve Base in California and flew it to Hill Air Force Base in Utah. The reactor, built by Valar Atomics, was small enough to fit inside a standard cargo...
Mystery Weapon Appears on Navy Destroyer
Share this story A photograph taken at Pearl Harbor on March 29 showed something unusual on the aft deck of the USS Carl M. Levin (DDG-120): a launcher that nobody outside the Navy could immediately identify. Mounted between the destroyer’s port-side torpedo tubes and...
Britain’s Drone Killer: From Sketch to Contract in 14 Months
Share this story In late 2024, a group of engineers, venture capitalists, and a former British defence secretary founded a company in Cambridge with a single goal: build a weapon that could kill a Shahed drone for roughly the same price as the drone itself. Fourteen...
Before Lindbergh: The Two Men Who First Crossed the Atlantic Non-Stop
On June 15, 1919, at 8:40 in the morning, a Vickers Vimy biplane with two Rolls-Royce Eagle engines and no radio contact with the outside world nosed down through the clouds over the west coast of Ireland — and drove itself straight into a bog at Derrygimlagh, near...
Mach 6.7 at the Edge of Space: The X-15 Story
Share this story On October 3, 1967, test pilot William J. “Pete” Knight climbed into a black, dart-shaped aircraft bolted to the wing of a B-52 bomber. At 45,000 feet over the Mojave Desert, the B-52 released him. Knight lit the rocket engine. In the next 84 seconds,...
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