JP-8, JP-5 and Jet A: The Fuels Fighter Jets Burn
Share this story Walk up to a fighter jet after a sortie and the smell hits you before anything else: warm kerosene. To most people, jet fuel is just jet fuel. To air forces and navies, it is a family of carefully specified liquids with names like JP-8, JP-5 and F-24,...
Combat Air Patrol Explained: What a CAP Is and Why Fighters Orbit
Share this story Not every fighter mission is a dash to a target. A lot of the time, fighter pilots fly in circles. They take off, climb to a patch of sky, and orbit there for hours, burning fuel, refuelling from tankers and watching their radar. Nothing happens, and...
TACAN Explained: How Military Jets Find Their Way Home
Share this story A fighter pilot coming home in bad weather wants to know two things: which direction is base, and how far away is it. For more than seventy years, the answer in military cockpits has come from a system with a slightly clumsy name: TACAN, short for...
Indian Air Force Day: Four Wapitis and the Birth of the IAF in 1932
Share this story Today the Indian Air Force flies Rafales, Su-30MKIs and Tejas fighters and is one of the largest air forces in the world. On Thursday it turns 94. Its first combat unit was four fabric-covered biplanes and a handful of young pilots on an airfield...
Operation Badr: Egypt’s 200-Jet Opening Strike of the 1973 War
Share this story At two o’clock in the afternoon on 6 October 1973, Yom Kippur, the holiest day in the Jewish calendar, the sky over the Suez Canal filled with Egyptian jets. More than 200 of them crossed the canal at low level and fanned out across the Sinai,...
Lockheed Offers 48 India-Built C-130Js in $10.5 Billion Bid
Share this story India wants 60 new military transport aircraft, and it wants most of them made in India. Lockheed Martin has now said exactly how it would do that: build a dozen C-130J Super Hercules in Georgia, and the other 48 in India with Tata. The offer, set out...
Germany Eyes GCAP: Berlin Explores Britain’s Sixth-Gen Fighter
Share this story Four months ago, Germany walked out of FCAS, the sixth-generation fighter it was supposed to build with France and Spain. Now Berlin is quietly looking at the other side of the Channel. According to Politico, German and British officials have begun...
Chinese J-16 Buzzes Philippine Patrol Plane Over Scarborough Shoal
Share this story A Cessna Caravan is about as unthreatening as a military aircraft gets: one turboprop engine, fixed landing gear and a cruising speed of well under 200 knots. On Friday, one of them was doing a routine maritime patrol over Scarborough Shoal when a...
Khanskaya Air Base: Ukrainian Drones Hit a Su-35 and a Su-34
Share this story It was around one o’clock on Sunday morning when residents on the edge of Maykop, in Russia’s Republic of Adygea, heard the drone engines. Then came the air defence fire, and then the explosions. By daylight, Ukraine’s Security...
B-1B Bombers Leave RAF Fairford After Suspected Terror Plot
Share this story On Sunday morning the bombers simply left. One after another, the B-1B Lancers that had spent months flying out of RAF Fairford in Gloucestershire lined up, took off and pointed west. By the end of the day, at least three of them were already on the...
Recent Comments