Solca Drone Crash: Romanian F-16s and Spanish Hornets Scramble
Share this story It was over in four minutes. By the time two Romanian F-16s were airborne from Borcea and a helicopter was lifting out of Bacău, the thing they had been sent to find was already down in a forest outside a town of three thousand people, and...
Finland and Sweden: First Joint Intercept Over the Gulf of Finland
Share this story Two air forces that spent decades outside every alliance scrambled together on Thursday, and for the first time in their history they did it as one. On 24 September 2026, Finnish and Swedish Quick Reaction Alert fighters were launched to intercept and...
Fairey Firefly: Two Seats, a Griffon and a Very Long War
Share this story The Royal Navy spent the first half of the Second World War discovering that a carrier fighter needs a second crew member. Over the ocean there are no landmarks, no roads and no friendly towns, and a single-seat pilot who is busy fighting is a pilot...
Hiller Hornet: The Helicopter With Ramjets on Its Blade Tips
Share this story A helicopter is mostly a machine for dealing with the consequences of its own engine. Put a motor in the fuselage and you need a gearbox to get the power up to the rotor, a shaft to carry it, and a tail rotor to stop the fuselage spinning the opposite...
Hawker Siddeley P.1154: The Supersonic Harrier Britain Cancelled
Share this story Britain came within one government decision of fielding a supersonic Harrier. Not a paper study: a funded aircraft with an engine on a test stand and three airframes being built. It was called the Hawker Siddeley P.1154, and the reason it does not...
Do Military Aviators Get More Skin Cancer? A New Study Says Yes
Share this story Aircrew spend their working lives closer to the sun than almost anyone else, under canopies and windscreens designed for visibility rather than for blocking ultraviolet light. The question of whether that shows up in their medical records has been...
Joker and Bingo: How Fighter Pilots Talk About Fuel
Share this story Airline pilots talk about fuel in kilograms and minutes, and they argue about it with dispatch before they leave the gate. Fighter pilots use two words, and neither of them is negotiable once airborne. Joker means it is time to start thinking about...
MiG-29 Intake Doors: Why the Fulcrum Shuts Its Own Air Inlets
Share this story Watch a MiG-29 line up and open the throttles, and something happens that no Western fighter does. The main air intakes shut. Two doors swing across the inlets, sealing them off, and the engines start breathing through rows of louvres that have popped...
Angled Decks and the Meatball: How Carrier Landings Were Fixed
Share this story For the first thirty years of carrier aviation, landing on a ship worked like this. You flew a curving approach towards a straight deck with aircraft parked on the front half of it. A man standing on the stern waved coloured paddles at you. If you got...
Apollo Laser: The Netherlands Will Build Australia’s Drone Killer
Share this story Every drone shot down over Europe in the past year has been destroyed by something that cost more than the drone did. That is the arithmetic problem sitting underneath the whole counter-drone debate, and it is the reason a Dutch state secretary has...
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