Share this story Just after dawn on Monday, air-raid sirens and the buzz of engines reached a city most of the war had never touched. Nizhnekamsk sits roughly 1,200 kilometres (750 miles) from the nearest Ukrainian-held ground, deep in the Russian republic of...
Share this story When people picture wartime aircraft, they picture fighters and bombers. Almost no one pictures a helicopter — yet by 1942 Germany was flying a nimble little rotorcraft off the decks of warships, spotting submarines in the Baltic. It was the...
Share this story On the Fourth of July 1989, two American F-15 pilots on alert in the Netherlands were scrambled to intercept an intruder crossing into NATO airspace. What they found was a real Soviet fighter, deep over Western Europe — with no one flying it.It...
Share this story By 1944 the Republic P-47 Thunderbolt was already one of the biggest, heaviest single-engine fighters of the war — a seven-ton brute that pilots adored. Then Republic asked a wild question: what if we made it even bigger, and bolted on the most...
Share this story In the early 1950s, the U.S. Navy asked American industry a genuinely strange question: could a fighter take off straight up, standing on its tail, from a platform on the back of a warship? Lockheed’s answer was a stubby little aircraft that...
Share this story Long before the Predator, before the Reaper, before a single Hellfire was ever fired from an unmanned aircraft, a little jet-powered drone with a bug’s name was already flying spy missions over the most heavily defended airspace on Earth. It was...
Share this story In the first days of October 1973, Israel was losing. Egyptian and Syrian armies had struck on Yom Kippur, and Israeli tanks and aircraft were being destroyed faster than the country could replace them. Then, out of the western sky, came the sound of...
Share this story It is white, it is enormous, and it is faster than almost anything with a bomb bay. Russian crews call the Tupolev Tu-160 the “White Swan” for its pale anti-flash paint and its improbably graceful lines. The rest of the world knows it by...
Share this story Somewhere over the Nevada desert on a July morning in 1957, five American officers stood in the open, looked straight up, and waited for a nuclear weapon to go off directly above their heads. There was no bunker. There was no lead shielding. There was...
Share this story A Marine fighter squadron that flew its last Hornet into retirement in 2023 is coming back — and this time it is coming back for the carrier deck.On 31 July 2026, Marine Fighter Attack Squadron 115, the “Silver Eagles,” flew the...
Share this story Somewhere under the granite of Taiwan’s Central Mountain Range, a squadron of fighter jets rolled into a cave and the blast doors closed behind them. This was not a movie set. It was this week’s headline act of Han Kuang 42, the...
Share this story It is the kind of thing a weekend pilot never expects to see filling the windscreen: the grey nose of an F-16 Fighting Falcon sliding into formation a few wingspans away, wings heavy with missiles. On Sunday, at least one general-aviation pilot over...
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