Share this story On May 19, 2026, the United States Air Force ordered an operational pause for its entire fleet of T-38 Talon jet trainers. Every T-38 across every command—Air Education and Training Command, Air Combat Command, Air Force Materiel Command, and...
Share this story There is an aircraft that first flew when Harry Truman was president, that dropped conventional bombs over Vietnam and precision-guided munitions over Afghanistan, that practiced nuclear deterrence through the Cuban Missile Crisis and Desert Storm and...
Share this story There is a number that keeps the people who manage America’s drone fleet awake at night, and that number is 189. That is the minimum number of MQ-9 Reapers the Air Force says it needs to sustain its worldwide intelligence, surveillance,...
Share this story The B-1B Lancer is getting the biggest weapons upgrade in its operational history. The U.S. Air Force’s Load Adaptable Modular (LAM) pylon program will restore six dormant external hardpoints on the bomber, boosting its total precision weapons...
Share this story Bill Allen, Boeing’s president, was watching the hydroplane races on Lake Washington from a company yacht on 7 August 1955. The new Boeing 367-80 — the prototype of what would become the 707 — was scheduled to fly overhead in a demonstration for...
Share this story On August 3, 1945, a Japanese test pilot named Masayoshi Tsuruno climbed into the strangest fighter prototype Japan had ever built and pushed the throttle forward. The aircraft trundled along the runway at Kyūshū Aircraft Company’s Mushiroda...
Share this story If you ever stand in front of the gigantic Cold War hangar at the National Museum of the United States Air Force in Dayton, Ohio, you will see, parked between an XB-70 Valkyrie and a YF-12, something that looks like it landed there yesterday — a domed...
Share this story In 1960, in a hangar at the Bell Aircraft plant at Niagara Falls, New York, Bell unveiled the wildest single-seat fighter ever proposed by an American manufacturer. It had a needle-nosed fuselage, two wing-tip nacelles that could swivel through 100...
On 1 August 1955, Tony LeVier lifted a strange new Lockheed aircraft off a dry lake bed in the Nevada desert. The aircraft had impossibly long, narrow wings — like a powered glider — and was powered by a single jet engine. It climbed like nothing he had ever flown,...
Share this story On 10 September 1956, in the high desert above Edwards Air Force Base, North American Aviation's chief test pilot Bob Baker pushed the throttle of an aircraft nobody outside the U.S. Air Force fighter procurement office had ever heard of into...
Share this story In late 1958, in the high Texas sky over Naval Air Station Dallas, Vought's chief test pilot John Konrad flew an aircraft that could outmanoeuvre, outclimb, outrun and outturn the future F-4 Phantom II. The aircraft had a single engine. It had no...
Share this story Seventy-four years ago today — 19 May 1952 — at Edwards Air Force Base in the high California desert, Grumman test pilot Corwin “Corky” Meyer climbed into the cockpit of an aircraft so strange that nobody else in the U.S. Navy...
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