Convair XF-92A: The Delta Nobody Wanted to Fly
Share this story Every delta-winged aircraft America built in the 1950s and 1960s owes something to one prototype that only one pilot ever had a good word for, and he did not really. The Convair XF-92A flew 118 times over five years, was rebuilt around three different...
Namsi 1951: Black Tuesday and the End of the B-29
Share this story Nine B-29s took off from Kadena on Okinawa on the morning of 23 October 1951. Their target was Namsi, a North Korean airfield still under construction, sitting about thirty miles from Antung — where roughly a hundred MiG-15s were based on the...
Catalina Affair: The Shootdown Sweden Denied for 40 Years
Share this story The Catalina affair is named after the wrong aeroplane. The Catalina survived. Its seven-man crew were fished out of the Baltic by a West German freighter and went home. The aircraft that mattered was a Douglas DC-3 called Hugin, and it went into the...
Italy Orders Two MQ-9A Reapers Built for Nobody
Share this story Somewhere in San Diego there were two MQ-9A Reapers that nobody had bought. They are Italian now. A note on the pictures: no photograph of an Italian Air Force MQ-9 is available under a licence we can use, so the aircraft shown here are US Air Force...
Boeing Offers the MQ-28 Ghost Bat to Japan
Share this story Japan is 6,800 islands long. Defending that coastline with crewed fighters means either an air force it cannot afford or gaps it cannot accept. Which is why Tokyo is now designing a coastal defence concept built around uncrewed aircraft — and...
RNZAF NH90: The World’s First to 3,000 Flight Hours
Share this story The NH90 has one of the worst reputations in modern military aviation. Australia binned its 46 of them a decade early. Norway walked away. Sweden is phasing its out by 2027. Belgium and Finland are not fans. The type has become shorthand for a...
PACAF Wants 60 DroneBusters and Has No Money Yet
Share this story It looks like a rifle, weighs less than five pounds, and you can teach somebody to work it in under five minutes. Pacific Air Forces wants sixty of them. It does not, at present, have the money to pay for them. On 8 September 2026, PACAF’s 18th...
TASACK: Poland’s Point-and-Click Loitering Munition
Share this story The problem with the FPV attack drone — the weapon that has defined three years of fighting in Ukraine — is that it needs a pilot. Not a technician, a pilot: somebody who can fly a fast, twitchy quadcopter into a moving target through a...
Pilatus PC-7 MKX: The First Dutch Trainer Takes Off
Share this story On Monday morning a white and red turboprop lifted off from Buochs, the airfield tucked under the mountains next to Pilatus’s factory in Stans, and flew a first sortie over central Switzerland. It carried the Swiss test registration HB-HCA and...
S-71K Kovyor: Russia Shows Its Stealth Missiles in Egypt
Share this story Russia brought its new stealth weapons to a sand-coloured airfield on the Egyptian coast this week and, for the first time, let people photograph them. At the El Alamein International Airshow, sitting on the apron in front of a Su-57 Felon, were three...
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