Share this story It is one aeroplane. That is the first thing to say, because the numbers here are small and the meaning is not. On Tuesday the British Ministry of Defence announced that a single Royal Air Force Voyager tanker will deploy to help Saudi Arabia defend...
Share this story It is the question every fighter pilot gets asked at a dinner party, and the one the US Air Force spent five years and a public innovation competition trying to answer properly. How do you go to the toilet when you are strapped into an ejection seat,...
Share this story The Directorate of History and Heritage keeps Canada’s official squadron lineages, and its entry for 664 Squadron opens with five words that contain an entire institutional quarrel: “This Canadian Army squadron was authorized”. 664...
Share this story On 1 February 1968 the Royal Canadian Navy, the Canadian Army and the Royal Canadian Air Force stopped existing. Not reorganised, not renamed — abolished, as legal entities, and replaced by a single service called the Canadian Armed Forces....
Share this story HMS Nabob was a Royal Navy escort carrier with a Royal Canadian Navy crew, and on 22 August 1944 a German torpedo opened her starboard side below the waterline, dropped her stern fifteen feet, killed twenty-one of her men and left her dead in the...
Share this story The Dome Fire had been burning in Yosemite National Park for five days. On Sunday afternoon a Eurocopter AS332L1 Super Puma was working it the way heavy helicopters do: dipping a bucket, climbing out, running in low over the trees, releasing, turning...
Share this story The fires at the Kapotnya refinery were out by Sunday afternoon. The damage to Russian civil aviation took two more days to count. According to the aviation security firm Osprey, the Ukrainian drone attack on Moscow overnight from 19 to 20 September...
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...
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...
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...
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...
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...
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