Operation Solomon: The El Al 747 That Carried 1,088 People
Share this story The certified maximum capacity of a Boeing 747-200 in the densest airline layout ever offered was somewhere around 550 seats. On 24 May 1991, an El Al 747 freighter left Addis Ababa carrying, by the Guinness World Records figure, 1,088 people. Two of...
Barnes F-35A: The 104th Fighter Wing Ends 18 Years of Eagles
Share this story In October 2025, three F-15 Eagles took off from Barnes Air National Guard Base in Westfield, Massachusetts, and did not come back. That was the end of eighteen years of Eagle operations by the 104th Fighter Wing. One of the pilots in that final...
Operation Thursday: The Night Gliders Landed in Burma
Share this story At half past four on the afternoon of 5 March 1944, a photographic officer landed at Lalaghat in Assam with a three-foot-square print under his arm and ninety minutes to spare. Captain Charles Russhon had flown over Burma that morning in a B-25...
863 Drones in 24 Hours: Russia Attacked Under the Cloud
Share this story Air defence against a Shahed-type drone is, more often than not, a human being looking up. The aircraft is small, slow, made largely of composite and plywood, and flies low enough to disappear into ground clutter. Radar helps. Thermal sights help. But...
The Indian Air Force Flew a Helicopter Dressed as an Elephant
Share this story Somewhere in the 1970s, on a January morning in New Delhi, an elephant flew down Rajpath. It was a HAL Chetak, the Indian licence-built version of the French Aérospatiale Alouette III, belonging to No. 116 Helicopter Unit of the Indian Air...
Khe Sanh 1968: The Airlift That Kept a Siege Alive
Share this story Khe Sanh Combat Base sat on a plateau in northwest Quảng Trị province, eleven kilometres from Laos, at the end of a road that had been cut by ambush since August 1967. Whatever the six thousand men there needed had to arrive by air. From 21 January...
RAF Pathfinders: The Squadrons That Lit the Target
Share this story In August 1941 a civil servant named David Bensusan-Butt was given 633 night photographs taken by RAF bombers over occupied Europe and asked a simple question: are they hitting anything? His answer broke Bomber Command. Of the aircraft whose crews...
Yahodyn Train Strike: Russia’s Jet Drones Reach the EU Border
Share this story A Russian jet-powered drone struck the engine of a train at Yahodyn on Monday morning, about two kilometres from the Polish border. Nobody was killed. The passengers had been ordered off fifteen minutes earlier, which is now a routine Ukrainian...
Trump Tells Ukraine to Stop Hitting Russian Refineries
Share this story Ukraine spent two years building the one capability that reaches deep into Russia and actually hurts. On Sunday, the President of the United States asked it to stop using that capability on the target it works best against. Speaking to reporters at...
Dude 44 Bravo: The F-15E Backseater Breaks His Silence on Iran
Share this story For five months the United States Air Force has said almost nothing about the man it went back for. He has no name in the public record. He has a call sign, and that is deliberate: Dude 44 Bravo, the weapons systems officer of an F-15E Strike Eagle...
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