Share this story On a summer day in 1965, workers and fishermen along the Ob River near Novosibirsk heard a scream of jet engines and looked up just in time to see something their minds could barely accept: a MiG-17 fighter, flashing low over the water — and then...
Ask which is better, the MiG-29 or the Su-30, and you have already misunderstood the question. They were never meant to compete. They are the two halves of a single idea — the Soviet Union’s deliberate decision to build one small fighter and one big one, each...
The most important document in the history of stealth aircraft was not written in California or at a secret desert airfield. It was written in Moscow, in Russian, by a Soviet physicist — and the Soviet Union let it go abroad because it decided the work was of no...
When the An-225 Mriya was destroyed in 2022, the world lost its single largest aircraft. But the West still keeps a giant of its own in the air — one that has been hauling tanks, helicopters and satellites around the planet since before the Moon landings, and is...
In the history of fighter aircraft, almost nobody remembers the runner-up. The jet that loses the competition gets a museum plaque, if it is lucky, and the winner gets the production line. The Northrop YF-17 Cobra is the great exception. It lost — and then went on to...
Share this story On the afternoon of 26 October 2001, Boeing chairman Phil Condit stood with his Joint Strike Fighter chief, Frank Statkus, in front of a television carrying a live feed from the Pentagon. The largest defence contract in history — one stealth fighter...
Share this story Pakistan is on course to fly something no air force outside China has ever operated: a Chinese stealth fighter. The Pakistan Air Force has moved to acquire the Shenyang J-35 — reportedly up to 40 jets — in what would be the first export sale of a...
Share this story In the desert of far-western China, a passing satellite caught something Beijing would much rather keep in the shadows: two enormous stealth flying wings, sitting in the open on a remote airfield — the larger of them nearly as wide as an American B-2...
Share this story There is one aircraft the United States hopes it never has to use for its real job: the plane that would relay the order to launch nuclear missiles from America’s submerged submarines. Its replacement is now running late — and the government watchdog...
Share this story Ten minutes after lifting off from New York on Independence Day, climbing through 15,800 feet, the crew of a NetJets business jet saw something big and silver flash past their windscreen — close enough to report it. Then it was gone. They keyed the...
Share this story Britain has put a number on its future: £298 billion. That is the size of the Defence Investment Plan unveiled at the end of June, the government’s four-year blueprint for rebuilding an armed forces bent on fighting “the wars of today and tomorrow.”...
Share this story A number from a Chinese laboratory has been making the rounds, and it is a striking one: 95 percent. That, according to a computer simulation, is how often a Chengdu J-20 beat an American F-22 Raptor in a fight north of Taiwan. Read a little closer,...
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