Thirteen Claims in Seventeen Minutes: The Arithmetic of Erich Rudorffer
Share this story On 6 November 1943, over the Soviet counter-offensive that became the Battle of Kiev, a German fighter pilot logged thirteen aerial victories between 13:00 and 13:17. Eight Yak-7s and five Yak-9s. Seventeen minutes. The pilot was Erich Rudorffer, and...
Ski-Jump or Catapult: The Two Ways to Get a Jet Off a Ship
Share this story A carrier deck is about 300 metres long, and a loaded fighter needs something closer to a kilometre. That gap is the entire problem of naval aviation, and the world has settled on exactly two answers to it: throw the aeroplane, or tilt the end of the...
Radar Warning Receivers: How a Fighter Knows It Is Being Hunted
Share this story Every radar that is looking for you has to shout to do it. That is the whole weakness of the thing. A fire-control radar cannot find a target without flooding the sky with energy, and any aircraft carrying the right antennas can hear that energy long...
Helmet-Mounted Displays: How Fighter Pilots Aim By Looking
Share this story In a close-in fight the old rule was brutally simple: to shoot at something, you had to point the aeroplane at it. The gunsight, and later the head-up display, sat fixed on the centreline, and everything a fighter pilot could kill had to be dragged...
HOTAS: Why Fighter Pilots Never Let Go of the Controls
Share this story A fighter pilot in a turning fight is pulling seven or eight times his own body weight. His vision is narrowing. He is breathing against a system designed to stop him blacking out. And he needs to change his radar mode, select a different missile, and...
V-1 Flying Bomb: The RAF Trick of Tipping It With a Wingtip
Share this story The V-1 flying bomb carried a warhead of several hundred kilograms of high explosive and crossed the Channel at roughly the speed of a fast fighter. Shooting one down meant closing to gun range behind it and firing into a warhead that might detonate...
David McCampbell: Nine Kills in a Single Mission
Share this story The Hellcat came aboard the wrong carrier, with two rounds left in six machine guns, and had to be hauled off the arrestor wire by hand because the engine had stopped and there was no fuel left to restart it. The pilot had just shot down nine...
GHOST-R: The Pentagon Buys Satellites That Can Chase
Share this story Most reconnaissance satellites sit in one orbit and photograph the ground. The two the Pentagon just ordered are designed to move, and to photograph each other’s neighbours. On 18 September the Defense Innovation Unit announced that Northrop...
NATO Chiefs in Copenhagen: We Are Ready to Buy at Scale
Share this story Defence conferences usually produce communiqués. This one produced a shopping list. NATO’s 32 chiefs of defence met in Copenhagen on 18 and 19 September for the alliance’s annual Military Committee Conference, and the message they...
Black Hawk Contract: 16 More UH-60Ms Keep Stratford Running
Share this story The Sikorsky UH-60 Black Hawk first flew in 1974. The company has been building them for the US Army since 1978. On Friday, Connecticut’s congressional delegation announced that the line at Stratford will keep running for another two years at...
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