Britain Designed a Mach 3 Bomber the Pilot Could Not See Out Of
In 1954 the Air Ministry wrote a requirement that no aircraft on earth could meet. OR.330 asked for a machine that would cruise at Mach 2.5 at 60,000 feet, be capable of Mach 3, fly 5,754 miles, and penetrate Soviet airspace and come home. Avro won the contract in...
Hawker Built a Mach 2.5 Fighter, Then Refused to Fly It
By the summer of 1958 the experimental shop at Hawker’s Kingston works held something very close to a complete aeroplane. The wing was built. The fuselage frames were joined. The undercarriage had been tested, the systems rigged, the wind-tunnel programme all...
Thomas McGuire: 38 Kills, and the Turn That Killed Him
Thomas McGuire wrote the rule himself. Never take a P-38 into a turning fight at low altitude. He put it in a manual the Fifth Air Force distributed to its pilots. On 7 January 1945, at three hundred feet over Negros Island, he broke it deliberately, to pull a...
Barking Creek 1939: The RAF Shot Down Its Own Fighters
Britain had been at war for three days. At quarter past six on the morning of 6 September 1939, a radar station on the Essex coast reported unidentified aircraft approaching at high altitude over West Mersea. There were no German aircraft. The plots were reflections...
Su-34 Production: Russia Has Built 212, Lost at Least 43
At an air festival at Mochishche aerodrome outside Novosibirsk in early August, someone photographed a Su-34 that had not been painted yet. Bare factory grey primer, straight out of the shop next door. It is a mundane picture that answers a question people have been...
Gilmour and Hypersonix: Australia Wants to Sell Mach 5 Tests
Two Queensland companies signed an agreement at Parliament House in Canberra on Monday that, on paper, is unremarkable: a rocket firm and a scramjet firm agreeing to work together. What they are actually proposing is a business almost nobody offers. Not a hypersonic...
Su-57E: Rosoboronexport Says It Has Buyers, Names None
Rosoboronexport says the Su-57 has proven itself in combat, that new export contracts for the Su-57E have been signed, and that deliveries begin this year. It will not say who signed them. Or for how many aircraft. Or for how much. The claim was made by Alexander...
AMP-HEL: The Army Laser Burning Cartel Drones for $3 a Shot
Since 25 August, a US Army laser has been burning cartel drones out of the sky over the Rio Grande Valley. Eleven of them in ten days. Each shot costs about three dollars. Military officials told CBS News that drone traffic in the sector has since fallen by roughly 75...
Saky: Ukrainian Drone Hits Russian Su-24, Tail Number 49
The video is short, silent and shot from the nose of the drone. A hardened airfield apron slides into frame. Then an aircraft, parked, wings swept forward, with a large white 49 on the intake. Then the picture ends. Ukraine’s Defence Intelligence directorate,...
Egypt Takes Its First Five Boeing CH-47F Chinooks
Among all the fifth-generation sales theatre at El Alamein this week, the most consequential thing on the ramp is a helicopter that first flew in 1961. Boeing has handed the Egyptian Air Force the first five of twelve CH-47F Chinooks, with the milestone marked during...
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