Tehran to Minsk: The VIP MD-87 Route That Lasted Four Flights
Share this story On the departures board at Minsk National Airport, flight ATS6446 from Tehran was listed under a carrier name that told you nothing at all: Private owners. It appeared once. Nobody has said who was on it. The aircraft was a McDonnell Douglas MD-87...
Pelican Ballistic Missile Debuts in Ukraine’s Moscow Strike
Share this story Kapotnya sits nine miles from the Kremlin. It is not a military district. It is chimneys and pipework and a wall of apartment blocks pressed right up against the fence, and on the night of 19 September it was lit from below by its own fires. By Sunday...
Thirteen Claims in Seventeen Minutes: The Arithmetic of Erich Rudorffer
Share this story On 6 November 1943, over the Soviet counter-offensive that became the Battle of Kiev, a German fighter pilot logged thirteen aerial victories between 13:00 and 13:17. Eight Yak-7s and five Yak-9s. Seventeen minutes. The pilot was Erich Rudorffer, and...
David McCampbell: Nine Kills in a Single Mission
Share this story The Hellcat came aboard the wrong carrier, with two rounds left in six machine guns, and had to be hauled off the arrestor wire by hand because the engine had stopped and there was no fuel left to restart it. The pilot had just shot down nine...
NATO Chiefs in Copenhagen: We Are Ready to Buy at Scale
Share this story Defence conferences usually produce communiqués. This one produced a shopping list. NATO’s 32 chiefs of defence met in Copenhagen on 18 and 19 September for the alliance’s annual Military Committee Conference, and the message they...
King Khalid Airport: Houthi Missiles Reach Riyadh for the First Time
Share this story Shortly before three in the morning, phones across the Saudi capital lit up with a sentence nobody wants to read: the area is under a hostile aerial threat. Residents were told to stay indoors. AFP journalists in Riyadh then heard two explosions....
Flying Tigers Contract: How America Hired Mercenaries in 1941
Share this story On paper, the men who flew for the American Volunteer Group in 1941 were carpenters, musicians, bankers, students and clergymen. One was a stonemason. Claire Chennault, the man who commanded them, travelled on a passport that described him as a...
Sully Sullenberger on His Alzheimer’s Diagnosis
Share this story Chesley Sullenberger has spent the seventeen years since the Hudson being careful about one thing above all: refusing to let the story be about him alone. He has pushed it back towards the crew, the cabin staff, the ferry captains, the training, the...
North Korea Shows Its Drone Production Lines, Not Just Its Drones
Share this story North Korea does not usually show you the factory. It shows you the parade, the launch, the finished missile on the transporter, and then the cameras go away. So when Rodong Sinmun published photographs on Saturday of Kim Jong Un walking through drone...
Luxembourg Airport Shut for a Night by Unidentified Drones
Share this story Friday evening, around nine o’clock, somebody flew something over Luxembourg Airport that had no business being there. Within minutes the busiest cargo hub in the Grand Duchy had stopped moving aircraft altogether. The suspension lasted through the...
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