Thule 1968: Four Hydrogen Bombs on the Greenland Ice
Share this story Somebody put four foam cushions on a heating vent. That is where it starts. Not with a missile, not with a Soviet fighter, not with a catastrophic structural failure. Three cloth-covered cushions stowed on a hot-air outlet under a seat before...
Marina Raskova and the Rodina: Ten Days Alone in the Taiga
Share this story At about seven thousand five hundred feet over the swamp forests of the Soviet Far East, a young woman clipped on a parachute, opened a hatch in the glazed nose of a bomber, and jumped out into freezing air because the alternative was to be crushed...
AEVEX and Divergent Will 3D-Print an Autonomous Aircraft
Share this story Two Californian companies announced this week that they are going to build an autonomous aircraft together. They did not say what it is, who it is for, what it costs, or when it flies. Ordinarily that would be a press release to ignore. This one is...
Russian Mi-8 Runs Out of Fuel and Lands on a Sakhalin Highway
Share this story The video is short and, if you have any imagination at all, deeply unpleasant. A Mi-8 descends towards a public highway on Sakhalin Island, main rotor blades sweeping low over a truck that is still driving along the road. Then the helicopter goes off...
RAF Boom Refuelling: Britain Finally Confirms the Capability
Share this story The Royal Air Force flies several aircraft that it cannot refuel. This is not a secret, and it is not new, but it is faintly absurd, and it has finally produced an answer. In a written answer on 2 September, Minister of State for Defence Readiness and...
Su-57E: Russia Will Unveil a Secret Weapon in Egypt
Share this story Russia is taking its export fighter to the Egyptian coast next week, and it is bringing something it has never shown anyone. Rostec, the Russian state defence conglomerate, says the Su-57E will fly at the El Alamein International Airshow from 8 to 10...
AFRL Wants a Cheap Hypersonic Cruise Missile It Can Buy in Bulk
Share this story Hypersonic weapons have a problem that has nothing to do with physics. They work. They are also so expensive that nobody can afford to fire very many of them, which in a serious war is the same thing as not having them. On 1 September the Air Force...
B-52 Bombers Land at RAAF Base Tindal in Northern Australia
Share this story On 1 September, a formation of very old, very large aeroplanes settled onto a runway in the Northern Territory of Australia, 4,000 kilometres from the nearest American base and comfortably beyond the reach of most of China’s missile force. That was...
F-35 Price 2026: What Each Variant Really Costs Now
Share this story For years the standard defence of the F-35 went like this: yes, the development was a nightmare, but the unit price kept falling, and eventually a stealth fighter would cost about what a fourth-generation jet costs. That argument has now run out of...
F-15EX Eagle II: The Pentagon’s Warning on Doubling the Buy
Share this story Buying more of a good fighter sounds like an easy win. The Pentagon has just published the fine print, and it is a reminder that in defence procurement, doubling an order is never simply a matter of writing a bigger cheque. Earlier this year the U.S....
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