The Mechanic Who Took Off in a Sabre and Had to Land It
Share this story On the night of 20 September 1956, a 20-year-old aircraft mechanic at Williams Air Force Base in Arizona took an F-86F Sabre down the runway for a high-speed taxi test, felt the nose go light at 105 knots, decided he no longer had room to stop, and...
Anduril Joins the Air Force VOLARE Contract to Design Jets in Software
Share this story Anduril has a new Air Force contract, and the headline number is $85 million. The interesting part is everything the headline number leaves out. The Air Force Research Laboratory at Wright-Patterson has put the company on a programme called VOLARE,...
The C-17 Eats the Runway. The Air Force Weighed How Much
Share this story The reel asks a good question. A C-17 weighs up to 585,000 pounds. It lands on dirt. So how does it stop without hoovering half the runway into four very expensive turbofans? The honest answer is that it does not avoid it. It eats the dirt, and the...
ASELSAN Flies Three EW Pods on Two TB2s and Jams a Live Radar
Share this story Suppressing an air defence system is one of the most expensive things an air force can do. It normally takes a dedicated aircraft, a specialised crew and a weapon that costs more than a house. Over Konya this month, ASELSAN did the first two-thirds of...
North Korea Shows Its Drone Production Lines, Not Just Its Drones
Share this story North Korea does not usually show you the factory. It shows you the parade, the launch, the finished missile on the transporter, and then the cameras go away. So when Rodong Sinmun published photographs on Saturday of Kim Jong Un walking through drone...
Marines Take EABO Into Combat for the First Time in Epic Fury
Share this story The Marine Corps spent six years arguing about Expeditionary Advanced Base Operations. Critics called it a PowerPoint concept built for a war with China that might never come. Supporters called it the future. Nobody had done it while being shot at....
Finland’s First F-35s Land at Rovaniemi, Inside the Arctic Circle
Share this story At 17:45 local time on Friday, the wheels of a Finnish F-35A Lightning II touched the runway at Rovaniemi, eight kilometres south of the Arctic Circle, with yellowing birch forest on both sides. A second followed. Finland has been paying for this...
Saudi Arabia F-35 Sale: State Department Clears 48 Jets
Share this story Saudi Arabia has been asking for the F-35 for years. On Thursday it finally got an answer, and the answer was yes. The US State Department approved a possible sale of 48 F-35 Lightning II fighters to the kingdom, an estimated $24.3 billion package...
Italian Typhoon Hit at Ta’if: Houthi Strike Damages an F-2000
Share this story Fighter jets are hardest to kill in the air. On the ground they are aluminium, composite and kerosene, sitting still under a sunshade, and the only thing between them and a warhead is geometry. Overnight on 17 September, at King Fahd Air Base outside...
Doak VZ-4: The 1958 Tilt-Duct That Predicted the Air Taxi
Share this story The landing gear came off a Cessna 182. The seats came out of a P-51 Mustang. The actuators that swivelled the ducts were taken from a T-33. In February 1958 this assembly of other people’s parts hovered, then flew forwards, and in doing so...
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