NAS Oceana Air Show: The Blue Angels Close Their 80th Year
Share this story At three o’clock this afternoon, six blue and gold Super Hornets will taxi out at Naval Air Station Oceana and close an air show that roughly 300,000 people are expected to attend across the weekend. It is the second of two performances, and it...
Silver Wotan: Germany and Sweden Rehearse the Fight for Gotland
Share this story Gotland is a long, low slab of limestone sitting almost exactly in the middle of the Baltic Sea. It has a few tens of thousands of residents, a walled medieval town at Visby, and a strategic value out of all proportion to either. This week, Germany...
King Khalid Airport: Houthi Missiles Reach Riyadh for the First Time
Share this story Shortly before three in the morning, phones across the Saudi capital lit up with a sentence nobody wants to read: the area is under a hostile aerial threat. Residents were told to stay indoors. AFP journalists in Riyadh then heard two explosions....
Camp David Intercept: NORAD F-16 Fires Flares at a Light Aircraft
Share this story At 7:50 on a Saturday morning, somebody in a small aeroplane over the Catoctin Mountains looked out of the window and found an F-16 Fighting Falcon sitting off the wing, throwing burning decoy flares into the sky. That is not a metaphor. On 19...
Flying Tigers Contract: How America Hired Mercenaries in 1941
Share this story On paper, the men who flew for the American Volunteer Group in 1941 were carpenters, musicians, bankers, students and clergymen. One was a stonemason. Claire Chennault, the man who commanded them, travelled on a passport that described him as a...
Shark Mouth Nose Art: Who Painted It First, and Why It Stuck
Share this story In a hangar at Moody Air Force Base in Georgia, in July 2024, a maintainer knelt beside the nose of an A-10C Thunderbolt II and peeled strips of masking tape off a row of white triangles. The teeth came up clean. Behind them, the eye had already been...
Navigators and Flight Engineers: How Cockpits Went From Five to Two
Share this story Somewhere over Russia today, a man is lying on his stomach in the nose of a jet transport, looking straight down at the ground through a wall of flat glass panes, with nothing between him and the landscape but a few millimetres of window. He is a...
Germany’s First F-35A Handed Over at Fort Worth
Share this story We have watched this particular aeroplane twice already: once when it went into the paint shop in August, and again when it flew for the first time on 10 September. On Friday, Lockheed Martin rolled 35+01 out under the lights at Fort Worth and...
Blackbeard Goes Into Production: 444 Rounds and an Air Force Cheque
Share this story Eleven months ago Castelion was a startup with an integration award and a good story. This week the US Navy placed a production order worth up to $200 million, and the Air Force quietly added $16.4 million to a research contract of its own. Two...
The Mechanic Who Took Off in a Sabre and Had to Land It
Share this story On the night of 20 September 1956, a 20-year-old aircraft mechanic at Williams Air Force Base in Arizona took an F-86F Sabre down the runway for a high-speed taxi test, felt the nose go light at 105 knots, decided he no longer had room to stop, and...
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