Share this story The runway at RAF Lyneham on the morning of 22 July 1966 held one of the least likely aeroplanes in Britain: a Lightning interceptor with no canopy, a disarmed ejection seat, its undercarriage pinned down, and a man in the cockpit who was wearing no...
Share this story Kuwaitis woke before dawn on Wednesday to the sound their government had already warned them to expect: air defence interceptors going up. For the second time in three days, Iran had fired missiles and drones at American bases on Kuwaiti soil. The...
Share this story Ukraine spent three years learning how to shoot down Shaheds cheaply. Machine guns on pickup trucks. Electronic warfare. Then, cleverest of all, small propeller-driven interceptor drones that cost a few thousand dollars and rammed a target worth far...
Share this story One of the most powerful warships on Earth just limped into a Thai port looking like a scrapyard find. After 286 days at sea, the nuclear-powered aircraft carrier USS Abraham Lincoln has pulled into Laem Chabang near Pattaya streaked with rust —...
Share this story The Boeing B-52 Stratofortress has been in service for seventy years and is on course to fly for a hundred. It has outlasted the Soviet Union, the propeller, and most of the engineers who designed it. And the design that made all of that possible...
Share this story South Korea has barely finished building its first home-grown fighter, and it is already reaching for the next one — and this time it wants to skip a generation. Seoul has formally launched the concept study for a sixth-generation stealth...
Share this story The Short Stirling was the first of the RAF’s great four-engine heavy bombers — into service before the Halifax, before the Lancaster, the aircraft that opened Britain’s strategic bombing war. It was huge, handsome and, in the end,...
Share this story When Soviet-built MiG-15s came screaming over Korea in late 1950 with their swept wings and steep climb, the United States Navy had a problem. Its best carrier jet, the Grumman F9F Panther, was a fine, sturdy machine — but its straight wing...
Share this story In the early 1950s the United States lay awake at night worrying about Soviet bombers slipping across the Arctic in the dark. The aircraft it scrambled to meet them was the Lockheed F-94 Starfire — the first American jet fighter with an...
Share this story In 1935 a newspaper baron dared British industry to build the fastest civil aircraft in Europe. The result was so quick that when the Royal Air Force turned it into a bomber, it could outrun its own fighters. Two years later that same design flew the...
Share this story The Blackburn Skua was slow, awkward and asked to do two jobs it could not both do well. It has been mocked ever since as one of the Fleet Air Arm’s worst fighters. And yet in the first months of the Second World War this unloved machine scored...
Share this story Nobody ever called the Fairey Barracuda beautiful. With its high shoulder-mounted wing, spindly legs and a clutter of struts and flaps hanging beneath it, the Fleet Air Arm’s torpedo and dive bomber looked like it had been assembled from spare...
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