Japan CH-47s: The JSDF’s First Overseas Firefighting Mission
A Japanese landing ship arrived in West Kalimantan this week with three CH-47 Chinooks and around 300 people on board. According to the Associated Press, it is the first known overseas firefighting operation the Japan Self-Defense Forces have ever conducted. For a...
Ukraine’s Next Fighter Pilots Are Training on L-39s in Canada
There is a pleasing symmetry in the pictures the Ukrainian presidential office released on Saturday. Twenty-one Ukrainian military pilots are in Canada learning to fly Western fighters. The aircraft they are learning on is a Czechoslovak jet trainer designed in the...
Akinci UAV-300: A Drone Just Fired a Ballistic Missile
A propeller-driven drone took off from a test centre in Tekirdag on Friday, flew out over the Black Sea, and put a ballistic missile through a ship more than 250 kilometres away. Then it turned round and flew home along its planned route. That is not how ballistic...
9/11 F-16s: Three Jets That Defended Washington Are Saved
On the morning of 11 September 2001, four pilots of the District of Columbia Air National Guard ran to their F-16s at Andrews without waiting for live weapons to be loaded. One of them, Lt. Heather Penney, had never scrambled an aircraft before. She had never even...
Swiss F-35: The US Non-Paper That Savic Never Passed On
Shortly before Christmas 2024, a document arrived at the Swiss Federal Department of Defence (VBS) from Washington. It was a non-paper — the diplomatic instrument governments use to float a position without formally committing to it. Its message was simple: the...
Northrop X-21A: The Plane With 800,000 Slots in Its Wings
Drag is the tax every aircraft pays for existing. On a transport aircraft in cruise, about half of that drag is nothing more than friction between the skin and the air. In the early 1960s Northrop and the United States Air Force went after that tax directly, with an...
Inkspot 59: The B-47 That Vanished With Two Nuclear Cores
On 10 March 1956 a six-engined American bomber descended through a solid deck of cloud over the Mediterranean to meet a tanker. It never arrived. No wreckage was found. No bodies were found. And neither were the two containers of nuclear weapon material it was...
Turbulent Turtle: The First Shootdown of the Cold War
At 10:31 Greenwich time on 8 April 1950, a United States Navy Privateer lifted off from Wiesbaden and turned for the Baltic. Ten men were aboard. None of them came back, and no trace of any of them has ever been found. The aircraft was called Turbulent Turtle. Nobody...
The Afghan Air Force Five Years After the Taliban
Five years after the Taliban walked into Kabul, one of the odder questions in military aviation is still unanswered: what is actually left of the air force the United States spent two decades and billions of dollars building? The honest answer is that nobody outside...
USAF Seeks Medium-Caliber Guns to Defend Its Air Bases
For thirty years the United States Air Force has fought wars in which nothing much threatened its airfields. Aircraft were parked in neat rows in the open because nobody could reach them. That assumption is gone. And the Air Force’s response is to go looking for...
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