Aerfer Sagittario 2: Italy’s Forgotten Supersonic Fighter
Share this story On 4 December 1956, an Italian test pilot pointed a small silver aeroplane downhill from above 40,000 feet and became the first man to take an Italian-designed, Italian-built aircraft through the sound barrier. The aircraft was the Aerfer Sagittario...
Operation Rimon 20: Israel’s Ambush of Soviet MiG Pilots
Share this story On 30 July 1970, four Israeli Mirages flew a routine photo-reconnaissance profile over the Gulf of Suez. They climbed to 35,000 feet, made the standard radio calls, and flew in a formation so tight that Soviet radar operators read four aircraft as...
Tempest Jobs: Where Britain’s Next Fighter Is Really Built
Share this story Stuart Anderson MP asked a dull question in July and got a dull answer in September. Buried in it is the clearest picture anyone has yet published of where Britain’s next fighter is actually being built — and a small arithmetic problem....
Poland Scrambled an Mi-24 Over Belarus. It Was Birds.
Share this story At 12:45 on Sunday afternoon, Polish controllers pulled a slice of airspace east of Lublin out of civil use. At 13:15, Poland’s Operational Command announced that an unidentified object had crossed from the direction of Belarus. A duty Mi-24 was...
Strait of Hormuz: Iran Claims a US Drone Boat, CENTCOM Says No
Share this story On Sunday morning, Iranian state television announced that the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps had struck a remotely operated US military vessel in the Strait of Hormuz, after it tried to enter what Iran calls a restricted area. By Sunday afternoon,...
Petrel AERO Sky: The Drone Mothership the Rangers Are Testing
Share this story The caption was eleven words long. “Golden hour. Live fire. Mothership operations with 75th Ranger Regiment, U.S. Army.” That is the entirety of what has been made public about the US Army’s most secretive infantry unit testing a...
Operation Atlantic City: An RAF A400M Lands on Jan Mayen
Share this story There is no harbour on Jan Mayen. There is no town, no permanent population, and for most of the year not much daylight either. There is a strip of black volcanic gravel about a kilometre and a half long, no instrument approach, and a 2,277-metre...
Aevum RAVN X: The Cockpitless Jet That Woke Up at Long Beach
Share this story A plumber driving home past Long Beach Airport on Thursday evening saw light spilling out of a hangar that had been shut for years. He turned around. What he found parked on the ramp was eighty feet of matte black airframe with no cockpit, no canopy,...
Ukraine Confirms Its Swedish ASC 890 Radar Plane Is Flying Combat
Share this story For four years Ukraine has fought an air war essentially blind above a certain altitude, relying on ground-based radar that cannot see over the horizon and cannot move quickly when it is targeted. On 5 September the Ukrainian Ministry of Defence...
Austria’s Twelfth AW169 Lion Lands, a Third of the Fleet Done
Share this story A single helicopter arriving at a mountain airfield in Styria is not usually news. This one is, because it is the twelfth, and twelve is a third of the way through the largest helicopter recapitalisation the Austrian armed forces have ever attempted....
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