Share this story A signature in a museum is not a fighter order. It is worth holding on to that distinction this week, because the two things are already being folded into one another. On 9 September 2026, at the Polish Army Museum in Warsaw, Under Secretary of State...
Share this story An air-to-air missile is built on an assumption: that something else will carry it to the fight. It expects to be released at nine or ten kilometres, already doing Mach 0.9, from a wing rail that has spent twenty minutes climbing. It expects a fighter...
Share this story Somewhere over the Luhansk region, a Russian Su-34 Fullback pulls into a shallow climb at around 12,000 metres, holds it for a few seconds, and lets go of four objects that look like ordinary bombs wearing borrowed wings. The aircraft never crosses...
Share this story Two accounts of the same night at the same air base went public within a day of each other this week. They do not agree. The first came from US officials speaking on condition of anonymity to CBS News, to Reuters and to Air & Space Forces...
Share this story The white jet with the blue-and-yellow tail sat on the apron at Chișinău on Tuesday afternoon with nowhere to go. Volodymyr Zelensky was due in Oslo that evening for the funeral of King Harald V, a state occasion with more than 150 inbound...
Share this story For thirty-odd years, the Oregon Air National Guard had exactly one job: shoot down the other guy. Its F-15 C-models were pure air-superiority machines, and the wing was very good at it. Bombing was somebody else’s problem. On 27 August 2026, an...
Share this story Stand at the fence at almost any air base and the fin of a fighter will tell you, if you can read it, which country owns the aircraft, which base it lives at, which squadron flies it, which year it was ordered, and occasionally whether the person...
Share this story The story usually goes like this. Germany built a wooden night fighter to match the de Havilland Mosquito. It was fast and it worked. Then the RAF bombed the single factory making the special glue that held it together, the substitute adhesive was...
Share this story In 1949, English Electric wanted to build a supersonic fighter with sixty degrees of wing sweep. Nobody in the world had flown a wing swept that far. The Royal Aircraft Establishment thought it would be uncontrollable at low speed, and said so. There...
Share this story On 5 December 1941, Squadron Leader A. E. Hill flew a photo-reconnaissance Spitfire along the Normandy coast at very low level and took a photograph of a clifftop near a village called Bruneval. In it, next to a villa, sits a large white dish. British...
Share this story In 1982, forty years after the last one made sense, a Soviet design bureau flew a jet attack aircraft with a rear gunner. Not a token installation. A proper remotely-controlled tail turret with a twin-barrelled 23 mm cannon, aimed by a second crewman...
Share this story Every airborne early warning aircraft in the world looks broadly the same: a transport or an airliner with an enormous rotating dish balanced on struts above the fuselage. The Hawkeye does it. The Sentry does it. Even GlobalEye, which uses a fixed...
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