Cooling the F-35: Collins’ EPACS Challenges Honeywell
Share this story The most advanced fighter America builds has a decidedly un-glamorous problem: it runs too hot. Every new sensor, jammer and processor bolted into the F-35 Lightning II throws off heat the jet was never designed to shed — and the fix has become...
Sweden’s NH90 Exit: Stockholm Bets on the Black Hawk
Share this story Sweden has decided that its most modern transport helicopter is not worth keeping. From 2027, the Swedish Armed Forces will begin retiring nine NH90 battlefield transports — barely a decade after the last of them was delivered — and lean...
Short SC.1: Britain’s First VTOL Jet, and Early Fly-by-Wire
Share this story A jet aeroplane hovering ten feet above a runway is doing something aerodynamically absurd. There is no airflow over the wings, so the control surfaces do nothing. The only things keeping it upright are puffs of compressed air from nozzles at the...
Armstrong Whitworth A.W.52: Britain’s First Emergency Ejection
Share this story On 30 May 1949, about 5,000 feet over Warwickshire, John Oliver Lancaster put an Armstrong Whitworth A.W.52 into a shallow dive and the aircraft began to shake. Not a buffet — a violent asymmetric flutter of the elevons and wingtip fins, roughly one...
Heinkel He 219 Uhu: The Night Fighter Germany Refused to Build
Share this story On the night of 11/12 June 1943, Major Werner Streib took a pre-production Heinkel He 219 up from Venlo against an RAF raid on Düsseldorf. Between 01:05 and 02:22 he claimed five bombers — four Halifaxes and a Lancaster, by the Smithsonian’s...
Aermacchi MB-339 at Fifty: The Trainer That Went to War
Share this story On 12 August 1976 a small blue-and-white jet lifted off from Venegono, north of Milan, with Aermacchi test pilot Franco Bonazzi at the controls. It was registered I-NOVE and it was not, by any measure, a revolutionary aeroplane. It was an old design...
Ukraine’s 426-Drone Night: Kstovo Refinery and a Wildberries Hub Burn
Share this story Shortly after one in the morning on 26 August, residents of Kotovsk — a small town in Russia’s Tambov Oblast, some 430 kilometres southeast of Moscow — counted at least ten explosions. By dawn a smoke column stood over the town, and...
F-35 Costs Jump $51 Billion: What the New Estimate Actually Says
Share this story The number that follows the F-35 around got bigger again. In a fresh accounting delivered to Congress and confirmed by the programme office, the cost of buying America’s stealth fighter fleet has climbed by roughly $51 billion since late 2023 —...
Chinese Fighter Exports: The Car Industry Parallel, Tested
Share this story Walk the halls of the IAA motor show in Munich and the story writes itself. Chinese cars everywhere, priced below anything a European maker can build, arriving in a market that spent a century assuming it owned the category.Now look at Jakarta, Dhaka,...
B-52 Radar Modernization: $766 Million and Still Testing
Share this story The Pentagon announced on Tuesday that Raytheon and Boeing had picked up contracts worth up to a combined $766 million tied to the B-52 Radar Modernization Program.It is a substantial sum for a programme whose central task is replacing one radar with...
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