Share this story In November 1953 the French army dropped thousands of paratroopers into a remote valley in northwest Vietnam, repaired an old Japanese-built airstrip and dared the Viet Minh to attack. Dien Bien Phu was meant to be an airhead: a fortress that lived...
Share this story Jet fighters had shot each other down before 1951, but never like this. Over the Yalu River in northwest Korea, a stretch of sky the Americans called MiG Alley, swept-wing jets met swept-wing jets for the first time in a sustained campaign. The North...
Share this story The Bay of Pigs is remembered as a landing that failed on the beach. It was lost in the air. Over five days in April 1961, a handful of Cuban pilots in old British piston fighters and American-built jet trainers beat a CIA air force, sank the ships...
Share this story A little before one o’clock in the morning on 6 September 2007, a single word came over the radio in an Israeli Air Force command post: “Arizona”. It meant that a building in the desert of eastern Syria, a building the Israelis...
Share this story France has had a gap in its electronic ears since 2022, and a business jet with an unusual bulge under its nose is about to close it. The first Dassault Falcon 8X Archange, the French Air and Space Force’s new strategic signals-intelligence...
Share this story The F-47 has not flown yet, but the US Air Force already knows where it wants to prove the jet is ready for war, and how much it is willing to spend on the buildings. A presolicitation notice posted in late October lays out an “F-47 Future...
Share this story For the first time in 44 years, a brand-new fighter type wears the maple leaf. On 22 October 2026 the Royal Canadian Air Force took delivery of its first two CF-35A Lightning IIs at Luke Air Force Base, Arizona, and announced the news on social media...
Share this story On the road between St. Louis and Mascoutah, Illinois, drivers recently passed something that looked like a manta ray in a white bedsheet. It was the US Navy’s second MQ-25A Stingray, wings folded and fuselage shrink-wrapped, riding a flatbed...
Share this story Europe’s best-funded defence start-up has decided the drone war needs a cheaper bullet. On Monday 26 October in Berlin, Helsing unveiled Contra, an AI-controlled air defence system, together with two interceptors of its own: the jet-powered AD-1...
Share this story The US Air Force has a tanker problem, and a Washington think tank has just put a price on fixing it. In a report released on 27 October, the Hudson Institute argues that the Air Force should stop buying the KC-46A Pegasus sooner than planned and...
Share this story Watch an SR-71 Blackbird leave the runway in full afterburner and the exhaust does something strange. The flame is not a smooth torch. It is a string of bright, evenly spaced beads, glowing knots strung out behind each nozzle like lights on a wire....
Share this story Picture it: two four-engine transports dropping out of the Patagonian night onto an Argentine runway, roughly 2,000 feet apart. Their ramps come down while the propellers are still turning, and dozens of SAS soldiers pour out to find and destroy a...
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