Share this story For months the story ran the wrong way. Poland was going to scrap its last MiG-29 fighters rather than hand them to Ukraine, a drones-for-jets deal apparently dead in the water. On 7 August 2026 the narrative flipped.Ukraine’s Ambassador to...
Share this story France has made its move. On 6 August 2026, Dassault Aviation handed New Delhi a formal techno-commercial proposal for 114 Rafale fighters — the long-awaited answer to India’s Multi-Role Fighter Aircraft (MRFA) tender, and one of the...
Share this story An extension to The Race for the Bomb, our focus series. Before the Enola Gay could take off from Tinian, the bomb had to reach Tinian — and the ship that carried it never came home. This is the story of USS Indianapolis: the secret cargo, the twelve...
Share this story An extension to The Race for the Bomb, our focus series. The Enola Gay needed a runway, and the runway needed an island. This is the story of Tinian — the Pacific speck that became, for one astonishing year, the largest airport on Earth. Sunset,...
Share this story An extension to The Race for the Bomb, our ten-part focus series. Part 9 flew the atomic missions; this piece goes back three months earlier, into the room where a handful of men decided which cities would live and which would die — and why the city...
Share this story Imagine you are a fighter pilot who has just bailed out over a cold, heaving sea, far from land, with the enemy coast in sight. You are alone in the swell — until you hear engines, and a big, ungainly flying boat drops out of the sky, lands on...
Share this story Some aircraft are ugly and effective. A very few are beautiful and useless. The Republic XF-12 Rainbow was that rarest thing: an aeroplane so aerodynamically pure it looked sculpted — and so perfectly built for a mission that, by the time it...
Share this story Look out of an airliner window at the swept wing and the engines slung beneath it in neat pods, and you are looking at an idea that was born on a bomber. The B-47 Stratojet never dropped a bomb in anger, yet it may be the most influential jet aircraft...
Share this story In the spring of 1942, young American pilots training in Florida had a grim joke about the sleek new bomber they were learning to fly: “one a day in Tampa Bay.” It was barely an exaggeration. The Martin B-26 Marauder was killing its own...
Share this story There is a sound no Western fighter pilot forgets: a deep, grinding drone that they can hear inside their own cockpit, over their own jet engines, as they slide into formation beside a giant silver bomber with four whirling pairs of propellers. It is...
Share this story German fighter pilots had a name for the big four-engined British flying boat they kept meeting over the Atlantic: the Fliegendes Stachelschwein — the “flying porcupine.” They earned that respect the hard way. Attacking a lone Short...
Share this story At 7:26 on the morning of New Year’s Day 1929, a fat, three-engined Fokker lifted off from a field near Los Angeles and simply refused to come down. For the next six days, seven hours and forty minutes, it stayed in the air — sleeping,...
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