How Fly-by-Wire Replaced Cables and Changed Everything
Share this story Before the F-16, every fighter jet on earth had a direct mechanical link between the pilot’s stick and the control surfaces. Steel cables, push rods, bellcranks — a system fundamentally unchanged since the Sopwith Camel. In 1974, General...
The German Jump Jet That Lost to Math
Share this story It is a grey morning at Bremen, late in the summer of 1971. On the concrete apron stands a stubby, hunched little jet, its camouflage still factory-fresh, the marking VAK 191 B painted along the nose. Three engines spool up at once and the noise is...
The Day Japanese Naval Aviation Died
Share this story It is just after ten in the morning on 19 June 1944, and Lieutenant (junior grade) Alexander Vraciu is hanging in the blue over the Philippine Sea, hood back, oxygen mask tight, hunting. Below and ahead of his Grumman F6F Hellcat, a loose gaggle of...
The Jet With Its Wings on Backwards
Share this story Roll the X-29 onto its back and the wings look wrong. Not damaged, not folded for storage — just backwards. Where every other jet on the ramp sweeps its wings rearward like an arrowhead, the X-29 sweeps them forward, the tips reaching out ahead...
The Aircraft That Had No Wings
Share this story It is the morning of 18 September 1972, on a Dornier test field beside Lake Constance. There is no cockpit to climb into, no pilot to brief. The machine on the apron looks less like an aircraft than a fat steel cigar laid on its side: a smooth...
The Drones Come Home: Russia’s Refineries Burn
Share this story The fire that broke out before dawn on Sunday in a refinery in Russia’s Krasnodar region was, by now, a familiar sight. Columns of black smoke climbed kilometres into low cloud over Slavyansk-na-Kubani, a stone’s throw from annexed Crimea....
The World’s Only Civilian Phantom Flies Again
Share this story It is mid-morning on 8 June 2026 at Ellington Field in Houston, and Harry “D-Day” Daye is strapping into a machine that has not left the ground in seven years. The ramp smells of jet fuel and Texas heat. Behind him sits Jerod Flohr, one of the...
France Turns a Cargo Plane Into a War Brain
Share this story It begins, as these things often do, not with a missile but with a laptop. Somewhere in the cavernous cargo hold of a French A400M Atlas — a hold built to swallow a helicopter or a 37-tonne armoured vehicle — an operator will soon sit at a console,...
A Robot Boat Just Rescued Two Downed Pilots
Share this story Somewhere off the coast of Oman, in the dark, two U.S. Army aviators are treading water. Their AH-64 Apache is gone — minutes ago it was flying a patrol near the mouth of the Strait of Hormuz, and now it is at the bottom of the Gulf. They are alive,...
Guard Generals to Congress: 100 Fighters a Year
Share this story Two-star generals do not usually gang up on Congress. This spring, twenty-two of them did. In a single letter to the House and Senate appropriators, every adjutant general who commands an Air National Guard fighter unit signed the same blunt verdict:...
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