Eglin Lost an FLM-136. A Florida Fishing Boat Caught It.
Share this story Captain Daniel Arsenault was running a morning charter out of Pensacola on Saturday when he spotted something floating offshore. He went over for a look, the way you do. Underneath it was a good-size mahi-mahi, which went straight into a cooler...
Pelican Ballistic Missile Debuts in Ukraine’s Moscow Strike
Share this story Kapotnya sits nine miles from the Kremlin. It is not a military district. It is chimneys and pipework and a wall of apartment blocks pressed right up against the fence, and on the night of 19 September it was lit from below by its own fires. By Sunday...
A-10 Weapons School Closes While the Warthog Flies to 2030
Share this story On 18 August 2026 a single A-10C Thunderbolt II took off from Nellis Air Force Base, flew a training mission over the Nevada Test and Training Range, and landed. Nothing about the sortie was unusual except everything about it. The aircraft was...
Thirteen Claims in Seventeen Minutes: The Arithmetic of Erich Rudorffer
Share this story On 6 November 1943, over the Soviet counter-offensive that became the Battle of Kiev, a German fighter pilot logged thirteen aerial victories between 13:00 and 13:17. Eight Yak-7s and five Yak-9s. Seventeen minutes. The pilot was Erich Rudorffer, and...
Ski-Jump or Catapult: The Two Ways to Get a Jet Off a Ship
Share this story A carrier deck is about 300 metres long, and a loaded fighter needs something closer to a kilometre. That gap is the entire problem of naval aviation, and the world has settled on exactly two answers to it: throw the aeroplane, or tilt the end of the...
Radar Warning Receivers: How a Fighter Knows It Is Being Hunted
Share this story Every radar that is looking for you has to shout to do it. That is the whole weakness of the thing. A fire-control radar cannot find a target without flooding the sky with energy, and any aircraft carrying the right antennas can hear that energy long...
Helmet-Mounted Displays: How Fighter Pilots Aim By Looking
Share this story In a close-in fight the old rule was brutally simple: to shoot at something, you had to point the aeroplane at it. The gunsight, and later the head-up display, sat fixed on the centreline, and everything a fighter pilot could kill had to be dragged...
HOTAS: Why Fighter Pilots Never Let Go of the Controls
Share this story A fighter pilot in a turning fight is pulling seven or eight times his own body weight. His vision is narrowing. He is breathing against a system designed to stop him blacking out. And he needs to change his radar mode, select a different missile, and...
V-1 Flying Bomb: The RAF Trick of Tipping It With a Wingtip
Share this story The V-1 flying bomb carried a warhead of several hundred kilograms of high explosive and crossed the Channel at roughly the speed of a fast fighter. Shooting one down meant closing to gun range behind it and firing into a warhead that might detonate...
David McCampbell: Nine Kills in a Single Mission
Share this story The Hellcat came aboard the wrong carrier, with two rounds left in six machine guns, and had to be hauled off the arrestor wire by hand because the engine had stopped and there was no fuel left to restart it. The pilot had just shot down nine...
Recent Comments