A Robot Tanker Sails Into New York
Among the tall ships and grey hulls that filled New York Harbor for America’s 250th birthday, the strangest silhouette wasn’t a ship at all. Lashed to the flight deck of USS Nimitz, between rows of Super Hornets, sat a windowless grey machine with folded wings and no...
The Stealth Bomber That Stayed Home
On July 4, virtually everything in the US military that flies made an appearance over Washington. Three bombers in one formation. Eight Thunderbirds. A brand-new Air Force One with a Raptor escort. The one aircraft everybody on the internet was actually waiting for...
Nine Hours of Thunder Over Washington
The thermometer read over 100 degrees Fahrenheit, the crowd on the National Mall had been baking since morning, and somewhere above the haze four F-5 Tigers were pulling into formation. One of them was flown by the administrator of NASA himself. It was 1:14 p.m. on...
The Day the Air Force Bombed Los Angeles — and Missed
On the afternoon of August 16, 1956, residents of the Los Angeles suburbs looked up to a strange and frankly alarming sight: two jet fighters chasing a lone, pilotless aircraft in tightening circles, hurling rockets at it — and missing, again and again, while the...
Tacit Blue: The “Whale” That Made the B-2 Possible
At a secret airfield in the Nevada desert in the early 1980s, a test pilot lined up one of the ugliest aircraft ever built and pushed the throttles forward. It looked less like a jet than a flying shipping container — deep-bodied, boxy, with a curved back and a...
The Nazi Fighter That Stood on Its Tail and Spun
Picture an aircraft that does not sit on a runway but stands upright on its tail, nose pointed at the sky like a rocket. Around its waist spins a three-bladed wing, driven not by an engine in the fuselage but by ramjets screaming at the very tips of the blades. To...
The Ramjet Fighter That Hit Mach 2 on Half an Engine
Somewhere over central France in the late 1950s, test pilot André Turcat pushes a strange delta-winged aircraft past the speed where a normal jet engine begins to gasp for air. And that is when the Nord Griffon comes alive. Behind him, a ramjet the size of a small...
The 1980s Nuke Missile the B-52 Can’t Retire Yet
The AGM-86B was designed when the Soviet Union still existed, gas cost about a dollar a gallon, and the B-52 crews loading it were younger than the bomber. More than four decades later, the United States has decided it cannot let the missile retire just yet. In 2026,...
Boeing or Northrop: Who Builds the Navy’s Next Fighter?
Two companies. One contract. Decades of consequences. Sometime around August 2026, the US Navy is expected to decide who will build the F/A-XX — its sixth-generation carrier fighter and one of the most important American aircraft programmes of the century. The choice...
China Doesn’t Need the Best Stealth Jet — Just the Most
For twenty years, the Western answer to Chinese air power was simple: our jets are better. The F-22 and F-35 out-sense, out-stealth and out-network anything Beijing could field. That may still be true of any single aircraft. It may also be about to stop mattering....
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