Marines Land F-35Bs on a Finnish Highway
Share this story It costs north of a hundred million dollars, it is the most sophisticated fighter the United States builds, and on the morning of 9 June it was sitting on a two-lane road in the Finnish woods, taking on fuel with pine trees a wingspan away.Two U.S....
Stalin’s Rocket Plane and the Devil’s Broomstick
Share this story On a freezing afternoon in May 1942, on a frozen lake near the Ural town of Bilimbay, a stubby green aeroplane the size of a fighter trainer crouched on the snow. It carried no propeller. In its tail sat a steel chamber fed by red fuming nitric acid...
Four Firsts, Then Forgotten: The B-45 Tornado
Share this story On the morning of 17 March 1947, two test pilots lifted a four-engined jet off the hard-packed lakebed at Muroc, in the California high desert, and into a clear blue sky. The aircraft was ungainly, slab-sided, and unmistakably a product of the piston...
One Panther, Seven MiGs, Fifty Years of Silence
Share this story The blizzard came in off the Sea of Japan in sheets, and the flight deck of the USS Oriskany pitched in the grey November swell. It was 18 November 1952, and Lieutenant Royce Williams climbed into the cockpit of his Grumman F9F-5 Panther for his...
Why Russia Can’t Stop Ukraine’s Drones
Share this story Just after midnight on 18 June 2026, residents of Moscow filmed something the Russian capital was not built to see: black smoke boiling over the Kapotnya district, where the Moscow Oil Refinery sits. It was the second strike on that single plant in a...
Romania’s F-16s Score Their First Baltic Intercept
Share this story The Alpha Scramble order reaches the quick reaction alert shelter at Šiauliai before the coffee has cooled. Two Romanian F-16s, fuelled and armed, are airborne over the grey Baltic within minutes, vectored toward an unidentified contact...
Boeing Won’t Build the Navy’s Next Trainer
Share this story Here is something you do not see every day: Boeing builds a brand-new jet trainer, wins the U.S. Air Force contract, and then tells the U.S. Navy, no thanks. On June 12, the company confirmed it will not bid the T-7A Red Hawk for the Navy’s...
The $3,500 Drone That Kills Without a Pilot
Share this story The buzz of a Shahed over Kharkiv has become one of the most dreaded sounds of this war. On the night of 8 June 2026, something answered it that no human was flying. A small fixed-wing interceptor lifted off, climbed to its waiting altitude, picked...
The Caspian Sea Monster That Spooked the CIA
Share this story In the late 1960s, a CIA analyst sat staring at a grainy satellite photograph of the Caspian Sea and could not make the numbers work. The machine in the frame was nearly 100 metres long — longer than a Boeing 747 — yet it was clearly...
The Jet That Took Off Hanging From a Hook
Share this story Picture a flatbed trailer tilting slowly skyward in the California desert until it stands almost vertical, and clinging to it nose-up like a wasp on a windowpane, a stubby silver dart of an aircraft. There is no runway in sight. There is no landing...
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