Share this story He never became a general, never commanded a wing, and spent much of his career infuriating his superiors. Yet John Boyd may have shaped modern air combat more than any pilot who ever lived. He rewrote how fighters are flown, how they are designed,...
Share this story In the early 1950s the United States, home of Boeing and Douglas and the world’s mightiest aircraft industry, went shopping abroad for a bomber. It bought a British one. The Martin B-57 Canberra — an American-built version of the English...
Share this story On 7 April 2003, Captain Kim Campbell rolled in over Baghdad to help American soldiers pinned down near the Tigris. She put her A-10 Thunderbolt where it was needed, took the shot, and started to pull off target. Then a surface-to-air missile found...
Share this story Most warplanes of the 1950s are museum pieces or scrap. The Xian H-6 is neither. Nearly seventy years after its Soviet ancestor first flew, China is still building, flying, and continually re-arming this jet — and the latest versions are among...
Share this story In the early 1950s, the U.S. Air Force wanted a single machine that could climb fast, find a Soviet bomber on its own radar, and kill it with a bay full of missiles before it reached an American city. The answer was the F-102 Delta Dagger — the...
Share this story There is an aeroplane in the Cold War Gallery at Dayton that the museum has deliberately not restored. Its wings are off. Its nose is crushed. The paint is scorched.The Lockheed XF-90 lost its competition, never entered production, and was officially...
Share this story In February 1938, inside a Berlin exhibition hall, a 25-year-old woman hovered a helicopter between the walls.Nobody had flown a helicopter indoors before. The Focke-Achgelis Fa 61 was the first genuinely controllable helicopter in the world, and...
Share this story On 21 June 2013, a yacht called Eolus struck a sperm whale roughly 1,200 kilometres south-east of Miyagi prefecture and began to sink. Two men took to a life raft: a Japanese newscaster and a blind sailor attempting to cross the Pacific.A US-2...
Share this story The United States is quietly building more room for its heavy bombers in southern Spain. Under a new military-construction plan, the U.S. Air Force wants to expand the apron at Morón Air Base near Seville so it can park up to nine B-52...
Share this story The Shahed used to buzz. Now it screams. Russia has thrown its production weight behind a jet-powered version of the Iranian-designed attack drone, and the shift is turning a slow, propeller-driven nuisance into a genuinely hard target — one...
Share this story When Emmanuel Macron flew to Stockholm at the end of August, the headline deal was maritime: four French frigates for the Swedish navy, a multi-billion-euro vote of confidence in NATO’s newest member. But tucked alongside it was something that...
Share this story Before dawn on Tuesday, sirens and phone alerts woke residents across eight regions of Estonia. A drone had crossed the country’s southeastern frontier, and a second was tracking toward the border city of Narva. On the runway at Ämari Air...
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