Share this story It started with one Airman, one routine inspection, and one smear of residue that should not have been there. Weeks later, the U.S. Air Force has yanked an entire family of test equipment out of its nuclear missile force — because the gear that...
Share this story Buried in Japan’s record ¥8.89 trillion (about $56 billion) defence budget request for fiscal 2027 is a single phrase that quietly redraws the country’s air-combat ambitions. The Ministry of Defense now describes the ASM-3 —...
A Ukrainian fiber-optic guided FPV drone. These wire-guided weapons are immune to electronic jamming and can strike targets over 20 kilometres away. (Wikimedia Commons) In February 2025, Ukraine became the first nation in history to establish a dedicated military...
Share this story For months it was a rumour with photographs attached: Uzbekistan, a country whose air force has flown Soviet and Russian hardware since the day it existed, had quietly bought Chinese fighters. Then Uzbek state television settled it. In a long...
Share this story Before noon on 31 August 2026, about 30 kilometres north of the little Polish seaside town of Łeba, Polish fighters slid into position alongside a four-engined Russian turboprop and escorted it along the coast. The aircraft was an Ilyushin Il-20...
Share this story On the morning of 30 August 2026, four Algerian Su-30MKA fighters and an Il-78 tanker came down the approach into Niamey. A day earlier, gunfire and explosions had erupted across the Nigerien capital — around the presidency and around Air Base...
Share this story Every helicopter engineer has the same dream: a machine that lifts straight up off a rooftop like a helicopter, then flies as fast as an aeroplane. The trouble is the rotor. It gives you vertical flight, but it also limits your speed — so what...
Share this story Imagine a fighter aircraft with four machine guns — and not one of them able to fire straight ahead. That was the Blackburn Roc. Its guns lived in a powered turret behind the pilot, so to shoot down an enemy the Roc had to fly alongside it, not...
Share this story In the early 1960s, a boxy little jet rose slowly off the ground at a Lockheed test site in Georgia, hung in the air, and set down again. On the face of it, the Lockheed XV-4 Hummingbird had done the impossible-looking thing: vertical take-off on...
Share this story On 3 July 1955, Western military attachés stood at the Soviet Aviation Day display at Tushino, near Moscow, and watched something that frightened them: wave after wave of big four-jet bombers thundering overhead. They counted, and re-counted,...
Share this story On 15 July 1941, a 28-year-old German pilot did something no one in the history of flight had done before: he shot down his hundredth aircraft. Werner Mölders had reached a number that once seemed impossible. Yet the record was not his most...
Share this story Tens of millions of people say his name every year without knowing whose it is. They say it at a check-in desk, on a boarding pass, in a taxi line in Chicago: O’Hare. Behind the world’s busiest departures board is a 27-year-old fighter...
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