Battle off Endau, 1942: Vildebeest Biplanes Against Japan’s Fighters
Share this story At around three o’clock on the afternoon of 26 January 1942, a formation of open-cockpit biplanes flew north up the coast of Malaya towards a Japanese landing at Endau. They were Vickers Vildebeests, torpedo bombers designed in the 1920s, with a...
Hawker Hart: The 1930 Bomber That RAF Fighters Could Not Catch
Share this story Imagine running an air force whose newest bomber is faster than every fighter you own. That was the problem facing the Royal Air Force at the start of the 1930s, and the aircraft that caused it was a sleek silver biplane from Sydney Camm’s...
Fairey Gordon NZ629: The Last Survivor of an RAF Biplane Bomber
Share this story On 12 April 1940, two young trainee pilots took a Royal New Zealand Air Force biplane up over the Southern Alps for a climb to altitude. Somewhere near Mount White, the Fairey Gordon spun, recovered, and then flew into the trees on a ridge. It flipped...
FWD Supreme: India’s AI-Piloted Fighter Shown as a Full-Scale Prototype
Share this story In July, India’s first AI-piloted fighter existed as renderings and a doctrine with a memorable name. On 13 October 2026, it got a body. Bengaluru start-up Flying Wedge Defence & Aerospace (FWDA) wheeled out a full-scale static prototype of...
Cobra Warrior 26-2: RAF Exercise Ends After 942 Sorties
Share this story For three and a half weeks this autumn, Britain’s skies hosted the RAF’s biggest homeland defence exercise. Now the Royal Air Force has published the final tally for Exercise Cobra Warrior 26-2: 942 sorties, more than 2,500 flying hours...
Ukraine’s F-16s and Mirages Now Outnumber Its Soviet Fighters
Share this story For more than three decades, the backbone of Ukraine’s fighter force was Soviet: MiG-29s and Su-27s, designed in Moscow and maintained with whatever spares could be scrounged after 1991. That era has quietly ended. According to an assessment...
Corendon XR456: Eurofighters Escort a 737 Squawking 7500 Into Nuremberg
Share this story Somewhere over the Balkans, shortly after 11 o’clock on Tuesday morning, a routine holiday flight from Corfu to Nuremberg set four digits in its transponder that no air traffic controller wants to see: 7500. In the language of aviation, that...
AN/ALE-50 and BriteCloud: How Towed and Expendable Decoys Work
Share this story There is a moment in the design of every defensive electronic warfare system where the engineering stops being intuitive. You are being tracked by a radar. The obvious response is to drown that radar in noise. And the moment you do, you have told...
Spitfire XIV vs P-51D Mustang: Which Was the Better Fighter?
Share this story Ask a room of warbird enthusiasts which was the best piston-engined fighter of the Second World War in Europe and you will start an argument that has been running for 80 years. Two names come up again and again: the American P-51D Mustang and the...
How Cheap Drone Interceptors Work: Sting, Coyote and Roadrunner
Share this story For most of the history of air defence, the target was worth more than the missile that killed it. A bomber, a fighter or a cruise missile cost millions, so a missile that cost hundreds of thousands was a bargain. Drones broke that arithmetic. A...
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