Share this story On 18 April 1949, workers at Newport News, Virginia, laid the keel of the biggest warship the US Navy had ever ordered: USS United States, a flush-decked supercarrier built to launch bombers big enough to carry atomic weapons. Five days later, the new...
Share this story At dawn on Sunday, 14 October 1962, a single grey reconnaissance jet crossed the Yucatán Channel at 72,500 feet and turned north towards western Cuba. Its pilot was Major Richard S. Heyser of the US Air Force. He was flying so high that he left no...
Share this story Anduril has never built a surface-to-air missile. On Monday it announced a whole family of them. Steelfin, unveiled on 12 October as the US Army’s AUSA conference opened in Washington, is a two-stage interceptor designed to shoot down cruise...
Share this story The US Army had planned to fill the sky over the Pacific with more than a hundred high-altitude balloons this year, the biggest balloon swarm experiment it had ever tried. It never happened. The balloons went to the Middle East instead, and they went...
Share this story The Coyote is the US Army’s go-to drone killer, and according to Raytheon it has more than 600 combat kills to show for it. On Monday the company revealed what comes next, and it has no jet engine. The new Coyote Block 2C+RM, unveiled on 12...
Share this story The US Army spent Monday at its biggest trade show of the year, and Sikorsky brought a shipping container. Inside it are four drones. The Nomad 100 Fast Pack, unveiled on 12 October at the Association of the US Army annual meeting in Washington, is a...
Share this story For two weeks the British government chose its words carefully. On Monday it stopped. Standing at the despatch box in the House of Commons on 12 October, Prime Minister Andy Burnham said the suspected plot against RAF Fairford, the Gloucestershire...
Share this story A radar is a very simple liar detector. It shouts a pulse into the dark, waits, and measures how long the echo takes to come back. Distance is just time multiplied by the speed of light and halved. There is no judgement in it and no scepticism....
Share this story Somewhere over northern Europe on Monday morning, a slim grey wedge with no cockpit sat on a launch rail, lit a rocket booster and went flying. No runway. No pilot. No ladder, no canopy, no crew bus. The aircraft is the Airbus U740 Valkyrie, and it...
Share this story Every two years at Zhuhai, China parks a row of radar trucks on the apron and lets the world photograph them. The placards promise a great deal. Metre-wave arrays that see what microwave radars cannot. Passive sets that never transmit....
Share this story It begins with a reclining chair and an hour of pure oxygen. Before a U-2 Dragon Lady pilot climbs towards 70,000 feet, the physiological support team seals him into a yellow full-pressure suit, screws on the helmet and parks him in a lounger to flush...
Share this story When a fighter pilot slams the throttle into afterburner, it feels like a direct command to the engine. It is not. On a modern jet the throttle is a request, sent as an electrical signal to a box of electronics bolted to the engine, and that box...
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