GE Prepares to Build the First XA102, the Adaptive Engine Meant for the F-47
Share this story GE Aerospace says it is preparing to assemble the first XA102, the adaptive cycle engine it is developing for the US Air Force’s next fighter. In an announcement on 15 September, the company said it is buying hardware from suppliers and testing...
Russian Woodpecker: The Duga Radar and Cobra Mist Enigma
Share this story In the summer of 1976 a sound arrived on the shortwave bands that nobody had asked for. It was a hard, flat tapping, roughly ten beats a second, and it walked. One week it sat on top of an amateur band, the next it was parked across an aeronautical...
Francis Gary Powers: The U-2 Shot Down Over the Soviet Union
Share this story It was May Day 1960, and the Soviet Union was celebrating. Somewhere above 70,000 feet over the Ural Mountains, a lone American pilot in a glider-winged jet was photographing its secrets. Francis Gary Powers had taken off from Peshawar in Pakistan on...
Yuri Gagarin’s Last Flight: The MiG-15UTI Crash of 1968
Share this story Seven years after he became the first human being in space, Yuri Gagarin was back in a very ordinary cockpit. On the morning of 27 March 1968 he climbed into a two-seat MiG-15UTI jet trainer at Chkalovsky air base near Moscow, with his instructor...
Canopy Detonating Cord: Why Some Jets Shatter the Canopy to Eject
Share this story Look closely at the canopy of a Red Arrows Hawk, a Harrier or a T-6 Texan II and you will see thin, wavy lines running across the transparency like a child’s drawing of lightning. They are not cracks, and they are not heating wires. They are...
Night Vision Goggles: How Pilots Fly in the Dark
Share this story On a moonless night over the desert, the world outside a fighter canopy is black. No horizon, no terrain, no other aircraft, only the glow of the instruments. Then the pilot flips two small tubes down in front of their visor, and the landscape...
Tail Strikes Explained: Why Airliners Scrape Their Tails
Share this story Watch a long airliner rotate on take-off and there is a moment when the nose is high, the main wheels are still on the concrete and the tail is only a metre or two above the runway. Rotate a little too fast, or a little too early, and that gap closes....
NORAD Chicago Intercepts: F-16s Flare Planes During Trump Visit
Share this story If you were flying a Cessna over the western suburbs of Chicago on Sunday afternoon without reading your NOTAMs, there is a decent chance an F-16 ended up on your wing. And for at least one pilot, the fighter did not stop at waggling its wings. It...
RAF Fairford Plot: Rubio Blames a ‘Foreign Actor’ as Five Suspects Are Freed on Bail
Share this story It started with a phone call at a quarter to one in the morning. Three vans, apparently heading towards RAF Fairford, the Gloucestershire airfield that has launched American bombers against Iran for most of this year. By dawn on Sunday 27 September,...
The KC-135 That Towed a Crippled F-111 Out of North Vietnam
Share this story “Mayday! Mayday! Mayday! We’ve been struck by a missile.” The call came over the radio late in the Vietnam War, as a KC-135 Stratotanker crew was finishing a refuelling mission over Southeast Asia and getting ready to turn for home....
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