Dassault Étendard IV: France’s First Carrier Strike Jet
Share this story In the mid-1950s Dassault built a small strike jet that nobody wanted. The French Air Force was not interested, and neither were the NATO air forces it had been pitched to. Then the French Navy took a look at a bigger, more powerful version, and...
Alpha Jet: The Franco-German Trainer That Went to War
Share this story Ask a Patrouille de France pilot about the jet they fly, and you may get an unexpectedly modest answer. They all come from the Rafale or the Mirage 2000, one of them told British forces broadcaster BFBS this year, and by comparison the little red,...
Austrian Eurofighters Deploy to Klagenfurt for the 20th Time
Share this story At lunchtime on Friday, 16 October, a flight of Austrian Air Force Eurofighters touched down at Klagenfurt, the civil airport of the southern state of Carinthia. Until Monday they will not train, not fly displays and not do circuits. They will sit on...
Gripen Flight Control Computer: Saab Wins SEK 1.3 Billion Order
Share this story Every second a Saab Gripen is in the air, a computer is quietly stopping it from tumbling out of the sky. The Gripen was designed to be aerodynamically unstable, because an unstable jet turns harder and faster, and it only flies straight because its...
E-130J Phoenix II: Navy Takes Delivery of Its First TACAMO C-130J
Share this story It does not look like a doomsday aircraft yet. Tail number 510 is a plain grey Lockheed Martin C-130J-30 Super Hercules, four propellers and a long fuselage, sitting on the ramp at Marietta, Georgia. But on 15 October the US Navy accepted it as the...
F-22 Commands a YFQ-44A Fury Drone in Flight for the First Time
Share this story Somewhere over the Mojave Desert, in the first week of October, a Raptor pilot did something no fighter pilot had done before: sending a new mission plan to a combat drone flying alongside, and letting the drone take it from there. The US Air Force...
MQ-9 Reaper vs Radar: Why Big Drones Are Easy to Find
Share this story A Reaper does not sneak. It orbits. For twenty hours at a stretch it flies long, patient racetracks over somebody else’s country at the speed of a fast train, hauling a sensor turret and a pair of Hellfires, in full view of anything with a radar...
Neptune Missile Explained: Ukraine’s Ship-Killer Turned Deep-Strike Weapon
Share this story In April 2022, Ukraine says, two missiles hit the flagship of Russia’s Black Sea Fleet. The cruiser Moskva caught fire, its ammunition exploded, and the ship sank. The weapon Ukraine credited was a missile almost nobody outside the region had...
US Weapons Test Ranges: Where America Tests Its Secret Weapons
Share this story Every new American weapon, from a heat-seeking missile to a stealth fighter, has to be shot, dropped, jammed or flown somewhere before it goes to war. For the past 80 years, that somewhere has mostly been a handful of enormous fenced-off deserts in...
Agile Combat Employment Explained: Why Air Forces Scatter Their Jets
Share this story A modern fighter is fast, stealthy and deadly in the air. On the ground it is a very expensive sitting duck. A few cruise missiles or a handful of cheap drones can wreck a squadron parked on one airfield before it ever takes off, as Russia learned at...
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