F-4 Phantom Crash at Athens Flying Week Kills Two Pilots
Share this story The display had been running for barely two minutes. Thousands of people were standing along the fence line at Tanagra Air Base, north of Athens, cameras up, waiting for the noise that only a Phantom makes. Then the jet came out of a turn, low, and...
Russian Drone Hits SBU Headquarters: Kyiv Spy Chief’s Office Targeted
Share this story At about half past three on Friday afternoon, a Russian drone came down on a grey neoclassical block at 33 Volodymyrska Street in central Kyiv, directly across the road from St Sophia Cathedral. The building is the headquarters of the Security Service...
Swiss Patriot Deal With Germany Collapses, Costs Could Triple
Share this story Switzerland ordered its Patriot air defence system in 2022 and expected the first fire unit to arrive in 2026. It is now 4 September 2026, nothing has arrived, and the workaround that was supposed to rescue the timetable has just fallen apart....
Piasecki Helistat: Four Helicopters Bolted to a Blimp
Share this story In the summer of 1986 the largest aircraft in the world sat on a ramp at Lakehurst, New Jersey, three quarters of a mile from where the Hindenburg had burned. It was 343 feet long. It was a Navy blimp with four helicopters bolted underneath it. On 1...
Kamov Ka-22 Vintokryl: The Soviet Record Breaker That Killed Nine
Share this story On 24 November 1961, a machine that looked like somebody had bolted two helicopters to the wingtips of a transport aircraft lifted 16.4 tonnes to two and a half kilometres, set six world records in one flight, and landed thirty minutes later with its...
SNCASE Baroudeur: The French Fighter With No Landing Gear
Share this story Every fighter jet has the same fatal dependency: a long strip of concrete. Destroy the runway and the aircraft is a very expensive ornament. In the early 1950s, with NATO planners assuming their handful of airfields in Germany would be atomised in the...
Thule 1968: Four Hydrogen Bombs on the Greenland Ice
Share this story Somebody put four foam cushions on a heating vent. That is where it starts. Not with a missile, not with a Soviet fighter, not with a catastrophic structural failure. Three cloth-covered cushions stowed on a hot-air outlet under a seat before...
Marina Raskova and the Rodina: Ten Days Alone in the Taiga
Share this story At about seven thousand five hundred feet over the swamp forests of the Soviet Far East, a young woman clipped on a parachute, opened a hatch in the glazed nose of a bomber, and jumped out into freezing air because the alternative was to be crushed...
AEVEX and Divergent Will 3D-Print an Autonomous Aircraft
Share this story Two Californian companies announced this week that they are going to build an autonomous aircraft together. They did not say what it is, who it is for, what it costs, or when it flies. Ordinarily that would be a press release to ignore. This one is...
Russian Mi-8 Runs Out of Fuel and Lands on a Sakhalin Highway
Share this story The video is short and, if you have any imagination at all, deeply unpleasant. A Mi-8 descends towards a public highway on Sakhalin Island, main rotor blades sweeping low over a truck that is still driving along the road. Then the helicopter goes off...
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