Cargo Drones: The Air Force Is Shopping Without a Programme
Share this story Every December, C-130Js from Yokota fly to Guam and spend a fortnight pushing bundles out of the back over the Federated States of Micronesia. Operation Christmas Drop has run for seventy-four years and reaches sixty islands. It is charming, and it is...
Next-Gen Tanker: The Air Force Asks If It Needs a Pilot
Share this story Somebody has flown every tanker the U.S. Air Force has ever operated. The new head of Air Mobility Command would like to know whether that needs to stay true. “I do not believe that it has to be a manned future air refueling solution,” Lt....
AGM-158 FLEX: Lockheed’s JASSM With a Nose That Unclips
Share this story The United States fired 1,100 JASSMs at Iran in the first 39 days of the war. That is not a stockpile being drawn down. That is a stockpile being emptied. Lockheed Martin’s answer, unveiled this week, is not a better missile. It is a missile you...
Space Force Electronic Warfare: A Guardian Under Missile Fire
Share this story She had been in the Space Force for two years. She was somewhere in the Middle East, at a console, with a trailer-mounted dish pointed at the sky. Within hours of Operation Epic Fury beginning she was handed a priority target package and told to...
CCA Drones Head to Emerald Flag in Their First Real Exercise
Share this story The U.S. Air Force has been flying its fighter drones for over a year. It has tested them, taxied them, launched them from austere strips and flown one alongside an F-35. What it has never done is put them into a proper war. In December, it will....
KC-135 Battle Damage: Patching a Smoking Tanker Under Fire
Share this story The crew were already aboard. The maintenance team was about to launch the jet. Then the base alarm went red and everybody ran for a bunker. When they came back out, the KC-135 Stratotanker was smoking, punched full of shrapnel holes, and sitting on...
Mountain Home F-15E Nose Art: Thanos and Darth Maul Come Home
Share this story Twelve F-15E Strike Eagles came down the approach at RAF Lakenheath on 16 September, six at a time, callsigns TREND 11 to 16 and then TREND 21 to 26. The tailcodes read MO. Mountain Home, Idaho. They were not stopping long. What made ground crews and...
AIM-260 JATM: Pentagon Signs Lockheed Production Deal
Share this story The AIM-260 was supposed to be in squadron service in 2022. It is September 2026, the missile is still in development, and the first photograph of one only surfaced four months ago. For a weapon the U.S. Air Force calls essential to winning the next...
Operation Arctic Vanguard: F-35s Fly From Pituffik, Greenland
Share this story The ramp at Pituffik is wet, grey and running with meltwater. Behind it a ridge of bare rock streaked with old snow. A marshaller in olive fleece walks backwards with both arms up, and an F-35A Lightning II rolls towards him with WI stencilled on the...
The Soviets Asked the Phantom Crews to Do Barrel Rolls
Share this story Somewhere over the North Atlantic, in late 1973 or early 1974, a US Air Force F-4C Phantom flew a barrel roll around a Soviet Tu-95 Bear. The Soviet crew had asked for it, by hand signal, through the glass. The photographs were taken by Robert M....
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