MALD Wreckage in Iran: America’s Decoys Are Still Flying
Share this story Photographs circulating from Iran this week show a scatter of scorched composite panels, burnt wiring and a small turbojet, laid out on bare ground. Iranian sources say it was shot down. What it is, is more interesting than how it got there. The parts...
VH-92A Marine One Opens the White House’s New Granite Helipad
Share this story For most of sixty years, the most famous helipad in the world was a metal disc laid on grass. Marine pilots bringing the president home to the White House aimed for it, set down on the South Lawn turf, and departed again. It worked because the...
FQ-42 Vengeance Flies Formation With an F-35A and an F-15E
Share this story Three aircraft, one photograph. On the left, an F-15E Strike Eagle in Nellis test markings, tail code OT. In the middle, an F-35A. On the right, something with no cockpit, no canopy, no pilot: a General Atomics FQ-42 Vengeance, sitting in formation as...
McDonnell F2H-3 Banshee: Canada’s Only Carrier Jet Fighter
Share this story The McDonnell F2H-3 Banshee was the only jet fighter the Royal Canadian Navy ever flew from a carrier deck, and Canada very nearly did not get it. The navy asked for sixty new aircraft. It received thirty-nine used ones, handed down from the United...
HMCS Bonaventure: Canada Refitted Its Carrier, Then Scrapped It
Share this story In April 1966 the Royal Canadian Navy sent its only aircraft carrier into a shipyard at Lauzon, Quebec, for a mid-life refit. The point of a mid-life refit is the clue: you spend the money because the ship has another life to run. She came out sixteen...
Moscow Drone Attack: 400 Flights Hit, 30 Jets Diverted
Share this story The fires at the Kapotnya refinery were out by Sunday afternoon. The damage to Russian civil aviation took two more days to count. According to the aviation security firm Osprey, the Ukrainian drone attack on Moscow overnight from 19 to 20 September...
OBOGS Explained: Why Fighter Pilots No Longer Breathe Pure Oxygen
Share this story Ask most people what a fighter pilot breathes and the answer comes back instantly: pure oxygen. It is one of those facts everyone knows, it was broadly true for about forty years, and today it is wrong in two separate directions. Modern fighters...
Houthi Strikes Called Off: Bombs Were Already on the Jets
Share this story Somewhere inside US Central Command’s area of operations on Sunday, ordnance crews were doing the job that makes a war real: lifting live weapons onto aeroplanes. Then the word came down to stop. President Donald Trump called off a planned...
Beartrap: The Canadian Invention That Put Sea Kings on Destroyers
Share this story The flight deck of a destroyer escort is roughly the size of a tennis court. In a North Atlantic winter it does not hold still. It rolls through thirty degrees, pitches through eight, and rises and falls a distance best measured in storeys. Now put a...
Operation Tundra Merlin: An Arctic Kill Chain Off Dutch Harbor
Share this story A hundred nautical miles north of Dutch Harbor is not anywhere. It is grey water, weather that arrives sideways, and the shortest line between the Aleutians and the Russian Far East. This week it has an American and Canadian task force in it, and...
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