Sweden’s Gripen Fires Its First Taurus Missile
Share this story For the first time, one of the smallest and cheapest fighters in Europe has reached far beyond the horizon. On Aug. 21, 2026, a Swedish Air Force JAS 39 Gripen C released a live Taurus KEPD 350 cruise missile over the Vidsel Test Range in Norrbotten,...
The Spruce Goose Flew Once To Win An Argument
Share this story Long Beach harbor, the morning of 2 November 1947, smelled of salt, diesel and quiet disappointment. Bobbing in the channel was the largest flying machine humanity had ever bolted together: a wooden flying boat the length of two-thirds of a football...
The 1969 EC-121 Shootdown: Cold War’s Deadliest Ambush
Share this story On the morning of 15 April 1969, a lumbering four-engine reconnaissance aircraft climbed away from a Japanese airfield on a mission its crew had flown, in one form or another, roughly 200 times in three months without incident. It was routine. It was...
Navy Weighs Renaming Carrier CVN-81 for Trump
Share this story Breaking — The US Navy is internally weighing whether to rename the future aircraft carrier CVN-81, currently designated the future USS Doris Miller, and could potentially name it after President Donald Trump, CNN reported on 20 August 2026 in an...
How a Dead Canadian Jet Reached the Moon
Share this story On the morning of 20 February 1959, a factory outside Toronto was building the most advanced interceptor in the Western world. By that afternoon it was building nothing at all. Prime Minister John Diefenbaker had risen in the House of Commons and...
Seven MiGs, One Panther, Fifty Years’ Silence
Share this story Above the Sea of Japan the air was thin and lethally cold, the clouds below him packed like dirty cotton. It was Royce Williams’ second flight of the day, 18 November 1952, and his Grumman Panther was clawing past 12,000 feet when the radio...
General Atomics Unveils Wildfire, Its Reaper Successor
Share this story General Atomics has a new drone, and it picked a name that reads like a warning label: Wildfire. Revealed to The War Zone and Aviation Week around 20 August 2026, it is the company’s clean-sheet pitch for whatever comes after the MQ-9 Reaper, a...
The F-117’s Explosive Secret Won’t Retire
Share this story Retired jets are supposed to sit quietly in a desert, gathering dust and pigeons. Somebody forgot to tell the Nighthawk. Eighteen years after the US Air Force officially waved goodbye, a dry-as-toast government contracting notice has just outed one of...
China’s Y-15 Turboprop Airlifter Comes Into Focus
Share this story Fresh, far clearer imagery of China’s new turboprop tactical airlifter surfaced around 21 August 2026, reported first by The War Zone and picked up across the defence press. The photographs, taken at an unidentified test airfield, give the best...
Taiwan’s First F-16V Block 70 Jets Head Home
Share this story After years of slipped deadlines, restarted production lines, and enough delay drama to fill a season of prestige TV, Taiwan’s first factory-fresh Vipers are finally pointed home. Two jets, tail numbers 6727 and 6728, lifted off from Fort Worth,...
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