Why the E-6B TACAMO Drags a Five-Mile Wire Behind It
Share this story A ballistic missile submarine on patrol wants to stay deep and silent. That makes it hard to talk to: ordinary radio waves barely penetrate seawater. The US Navy’s answer, since the 1960s, has been an aircraft that unreels a wire antenna several...
Global Thunder 27: British F-35Bs Escort a B-52 Over the High North
Share this story In the early hours of 24 October 2026, UTC, a single B-52H Stratofortress using the callsign HUSH 11 left Minot Air Force Base in North Dakota and pointed its nose at the Atlantic. Flight trackers listening to its HF position reports watched it...
MQ-9B Airborne Early Warning: Saab LoyalEye Radar Flies on a Drone
Share this story Somewhere over Southern California, instrumented “red” fighters played the enemy, airliners went about their business and ships moved at sea. Watching them at the same time, from long range, was not a big radar jet full of operators. It...
HYDEF Hypersonic Interceptor: Europe’s Answer Clears Stage One
Share this story A hypersonic glide vehicle gives a defender very little time and even less certainty. It flies inside the atmosphere at more than five times the speed of sound and can change course on the way in. Europe wants an interceptor designed specifically for...
Chinese Spaceplane: DIA Releases the Clearest Image Yet
Share this story For six years, China’s reusable spaceplane has been one of spaceflight’s best-kept secrets. It launches on a rocket, stays in orbit for months, releases small objects, lands on a runway in the desert, and Beijing says almost nothing about...
Geran-4 Jet Drones: Ukraine Now Downs Almost 60%, General Staff Says
Share this story Russia’s jet-powered Geran-4 drones were built to outrun the cheap defences that tamed the propeller Shahed. On Monday 27 October, Ukraine’s General Staff published a number that suggests the gap is starting to close: over the past three...
Japan AMRAAM Plant: US and Japan Agree to Assemble AIM-120s in Japan
Share this story It took a string of defence ministers on both sides of the Pacific and a little more than two years, but the AIM-120 AMRAAM is finally getting a Japanese address. On Wednesday 28 October in Cebu, in the Philippines, Japan’s Defense Minister...
Ethiopia Su-35 Fighters: Twelve Russian Jets Arrive, S-400 Next
Share this story The photographs look like any official handover: dark suits, a red rope barrier, a framed certificate held up for the cameras. Behind the smiling delegation, though, stands a grey-and-white fighter with the Ethiopian tricolour on its twin tails. On...
How Does a Counter-Drone System Work? Detect, Track, Defeat
Share this story A cheap drone is a hard thing to stop. It is small, slow and low, which makes it difficult to see on radar, and it is so inexpensive that firing a conventional air defence missile at it is a losing trade. Since 2022 the war in Ukraine has turned that...
Dieppe Air Battle 1942: The RAF’s Costliest Single Day
Share this story On 19 August 1942, while Canadian soldiers died on the shingle beaches of Dieppe, the sky above them filled with more fighters than anyone had seen over France. By nightfall the Royal Air Force and its Allied squadrons had lost about 106 aircraft,...
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