Nicole Malachowski: The First Woman to Fly With the Thunderbirds
Share this story Nicole Malachowski was five years old when she watched military jets at an air show and decided that was what she would do with her life. It was a perfectly reasonable ambition, except for one detail nobody mentioned to her at the time. The United...
Lima Site 85: The Secret Radar the US Lost on a Mountain in Laos
Share this story On the night of 10 March 1968, nineteen American airmen were living on top of a mountain in a country where, officially, there were no American troops at all. Phou Pha Thi rises more than a mile above northeastern Laos, with sheer cliffs on one side....
Latvia to Buy Anduril Barracuda Cruise Missiles for Long-Range Strike
Share this story Latvia wants to hit targets far beyond its borders, and it has picked the weapon. On 25 September, President Edgars Rinkēvičs visited Anduril Industries in California, met founder Palmer Luckey, and said he was looking forward to completing the...
Houthi Missiles Target Khamis Mushait, Home of Saudi Arabia’s F-15s
Share this story Early on Saturday 26 September, two Houthi ballistic missiles were fired at Khamis Mushait, a city high in the mountains of south-western Saudi Arabia. Both were shot down, according to the Saudi-led coalition. At the same time, two Houthi drones were...
Congo L-410 Crash at Kenge Kills Two of the Army’s Top Generals
Share this story The flight should have been routine: a short hop from Kikwit back to Kinshasa for a delegation returning from an official mission. Instead, on the afternoon of Friday 25 September, a Let L-410 Turbolet came down on a residential plot in Kenge, in the...
Flight Deck Jersey Colours: Who Does What on a Carrier
Share this story Stand on the bridge wing of an American aircraft carrier during flight operations and the deck below looks like a paint chart having a nervous breakdown. Yellow, green, red, purple, blue, brown and white, all moving at once, in a space the size of...
F-14 vs RF-4C: The Tomcat That Shot Down an American Phantom
Share this story The exercise phrase was “red and free”. Every other crew in the Mediterranean that morning understood what it meant: you are cleared to simulate an engagement. Call the shot, do not take it. On 22 September 1987, off Sardinia, a US Navy...
Solca Drone Crash: Romanian F-16s and Spanish Hornets Scramble
Share this story It was over in four minutes. By the time two Romanian F-16s were airborne from Borcea and a helicopter was lifting out of Bacău, the thing they had been sent to find was already down in a forest outside a town of three thousand people, and...
Do Military Aviators Get More Skin Cancer? A New Study Says Yes
Share this story Aircrew spend their working lives closer to the sun than almost anyone else, under canopies and windscreens designed for visibility rather than for blocking ultraviolet light. The question of whether that shows up in their medical records has been...
Steven Bennett: The OV-10 Pilot Who Ditched to Save His Observer
Share this story Steven Bennett had a working parachute. The man sitting behind him did not. That is the whole story, really, and everything else is the detail of how a twenty-six-year-old Air Force captain came to be flying a burning OV-10 Bronco towards the Gulf of...
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