Operation Frantic: The Poltava Raid That Burned 43 B-17s
Share this story On 2 June 1944, B-17s of the Fifteenth Air Force bombed marshalling yards in Hungary and then kept going east. They landed in Ukraine, at three Soviet airfields the Red Army had handed over to the Americans. It was the first time in the war that a...
Operation Halyard: Rescuing Downed Airmen From Occupied Serbia
Share this story By the summer of 1944 the Fifteenth Air Force had lost 350 bombers over the Ploiesti oil fields, and a great many of the men who fell out of them came down in occupied Serbia. They were not captured. They were hidden — in barns, in hayricks, in...
US Approves $800M Bell 412 and 407M Helicopter Sale to Iraq
Share this story Iraq already flies the Bell 407. On 31 August 2026 the U.S. State Department cleared it to buy a great many more of them, along with a bigger stablemate and enough guns, rockets and sensors to turn utility helicopters into armed scouts. The approval,...
Egypt Asks Dassault for 24 More Rafales, Taking Its Fleet to 78
Share this story Egypt was the first country outside France to buy the Rafale. Eleven years later, it may be about to become the type’s biggest foreign customer by a wide margin. On 2 September 2026 the French daily La Tribune reported that Cairo has submitted a...
MiG-29 Downs a Russian Banderol With a 1973-Era R-60 Missile
Share this story The treeline is close enough to count individual trees. The horizon sits high in the windscreen, the ground blurring past in green streaks, and somewhere ahead a small jet-powered cruise missile is running for a Ukrainian city at roughly the speed of...
Taffy Holden: The Engineer Who Accidentally Flew a Lightning
Share this story The runway at RAF Lyneham on the morning of 22 July 1966 held one of the least likely aeroplanes in Britain: a Lightning interceptor with no canopy, a disarmed ejection seat, its undercarriage pinned down, and a man in the cockpit who was wearing no...
Iran Strikes Kuwait Again as US Bases Come Under Missile Attack
Share this story Kuwaitis woke before dawn on Wednesday to the sound their government had already warned them to expect: air defence interceptors going up. For the second time in three days, Iran had fired missiles and drones at American bases on Kuwaiti soil. The...
Alexa Spatium: Ukraine’s Jet Interceptor Answers the Jet Shahed
Share this story Ukraine spent three years learning how to shoot down Shaheds cheaply. Machine guns on pickup trucks. Electronic warfare. Then, cleverest of all, small propeller-driven interceptor drones that cost a few thousand dollars and rammed a target worth far...
286 Days at Sea: The Rusty US Carrier That Broke the Internet
Share this story One of the most powerful warships on Earth just limped into a Thai port looking like a scrapyard find. After 286 days at sea, the nuclear-powered aircraft carrier USS Abraham Lincoln has pulled into Laem Chabang near Pattaya streaked with rust —...
The B-52 Was Designed in a Hotel Room Over One Weekend
Share this story The Boeing B-52 Stratofortress has been in service for seventy years and is on course to fly for a hundred. It has outlasted the Soviet Union, the propeller, and most of the engineers who designed it. And the design that made all of that possible...
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